Royal Enfield, Taj Mahal, Ganges

Baths in the Monkey Temple

After this short time in India, I had become used to the bartering system, and at Jaipur train station managed to haggle a cab down to $2 to take us our hotel.  There were two Canadian girls sharing the cab with us and they were quite cynical toward the advertising of our hotel, as it showed it to be quite luxurious.  Luckily they were proven wrong, and for ten dollars apiece, my father and I stayed in what would have been a four star hotel back home.

Jaipur at first seemed to lack the charm of Jodhpur, the previous city, but upon further study proved just as exciting.  The rooftop restaurant was picturesque but the food lacked the quality of the local’s cafes we’d been eating in.  I met another Australian at this restaurant, and after chatting for a few good hours we decided to go get a lassi.  Jesse had bought a Royal Enfield motorcycle way up north near Leh, and was riding it south.  The hustle, bustle and outright chaos of the roads were amplified by it being night time, and my being perched on the back of a motorcycle (very low on the road hierarchy), but surely enough we made it to the wallah and enjoyed a fantastic lassi (yogurt shake) and some choice street food.

The three of us decided we really had seen enough huge forts, so we flagged down a rickshaw to take us to Amber fort on the outskirts.  It was rather nice, surrounded by Great Wall of China stye battlements over the hills, and we were entertained by our driver Saleem and the remnants of the monsoon.  Back in town my father and I stopped in a local armoury to buy some knife because we like that sort of thing.  Ended up with a sweet little Muslim style dagger and a badass Lord of the Rings elven-looking short sword (Dad keeps taking it with him everywhere and gets stopped at the numerous checkpoints on the road all the time).

It was time to leave Jaipur and Rajasthan,  so with sadness we checked out of hotel Pearl Palace and jumped the train to Agra, about 6 hours away.  The trip was uneventful barring meeting a few cool Indians, and it was almost midnight when we arrived and booked into some crap hotel.  

I was looking forward to seeing the Taj Mahal so I went straight to bed.  The night was a long tortuous one; I was wracked with fever and had quite a few surprisingly prophetic dreams.  I woke up with a killer fever, at six a.m, and father dragged me with him to the Taj for the dawn viewing which was, even wracked with fever, quite incredible.  The building is impressive and none of the thousands of pictures you will find everywhere do it any justice.  I dosed up on the meds to sort myself out, and spent the remainder of the day resting in  the lobby of the hotel and drinking chai with locals just outside.

Our train was leaving at 11:20pm for Varanasi from a station about 30km outside the city, Tundla, a real shithole, and we left a few hours earlier to avoid trouble, arriving at the station at 9pm.

Six hours later, after drifting in and out of sleep on the scummy platform, our belated train arrived, and we made haste for our clean 2-tier air-con sleeper train, tipping the helpful porter who waited with us at the platform the entire time.  We were happy to arrive in Varanasi, and after we helped an old Venezuelan woman find her way to the city, we jumped in our shower at our awesome riverside hotel and cleansed our frankly disgusting bodies of the filth of India’s worst.

Varanasi, as it is with all other Indian cities we have visited, was completely different, but fully intense.  The touts here were the most persistent, and while my cold heart makes it quite easy for me to brush off the consistent offers of help and trinkets, my soft father falls victim with far less effort required.  He is getting better, but I always keep one eye and ear on him when we walk the streets. 

The Ganges river, the holiest river in Varanasi, the holiest city in India, is putrid.  It is a cesspool of filth, sewage, rubbish, animals, dead bodies (human), and mud.  To Indians here this is as normal as a daily shower, and they go about bathing, praying and even drinking from it.  From my perspective if I went for a swim in it, I bet I would emerge with a third arm or instant cholera, so for the time being I have steered quite clear, and have tried to convince my ever clever father that no matter how holy the river may be, Shiva won’t protect you from the multitude of death dealing amoeba that just can’t wait to have a swim in your bloodstream.  So far I’ve succeeded.

Next up:  Hilltop station of Darjeeling, then Kathmandu in Nepal.  Hell yes, this is where MY part of the trip begins.