North Trip

Pictures are of the Child Beer, an amazing ceiling design at the Jain temple, pillars at the Jain temple, one of a few lakes in Udaipur, and a temple in Udaipur.
Also check out my Facebook photos if you can there are a lot more. I will be adding more to the blog though.
I would like to say making a Facebook group to guilt me into writing my blog didn’t work but it did to a degree although I had already started writing a blog. Here it is anyway.
Ok so I haven’t written for a while but I have been busy. So this blog will tell about what I did before the North trip (briefly), and what the North trip was like (amazing).
Now I will zip through what I did a month prior to the North Trip. I was inaugurated as a guest member of the Rotaract club affiliated with my Rotary club, I went to a MS walk (which was only about 300m and then speeches) then I saw a circus. I have stopped yoga for the time being but I will start doing it in my house as I have learned a lot. On my way to yoga in November I had to walk by like 10 Garbage trucks every morning so that sucked. I saw another Hindi movie but still haven’t seen enough. Went to RYLA (Rotary Youth Leadership Awards), which was great. It was a full weekend of activities with groups, and they split up all the exchange students so we were forced to make friends with the Indian youth. My team was very friendly and allowed me to open up more than I would even in Canada. I did a dance on the stage with 2 others in front of like 250 ppl to a Hindi song and I also preformed a Hindi song it was insane. I would never do that stuff in Canada. The activities included teamwork and individual activities, such as valley crossing, a marble game, rappelling, flying fox, water games, yoga, maze games, feet tied together game, rope bridge, imaginary river, milk crates, rifle shooting, jumbering, speaking training, tennis ball, and listening. I never realized how hard listening is, most people don’t actually listen, especially me and the person conducting this session really proved that. I also have been volunteering a couple times a week at a NGO which uplifts slum children through education. Then there was the terrorist attacks mentioned in the last post. I also sent a package and some post card home.

Now the North Trip. First we took an overnight train journey to Udaipur which is in Rajasthan. Rajasthan is a state in the North West part of India. Udaipur was a very nice city it is called the lake city as there are a couple lakes within the city. Part of the James Bond film Octopussy was filmed at the lake palace in Udaipur which is a, you guessed it, palace on a lake. Throughout the trip we did mostly the touristy stuff so there were lots foreigners but you can’t call them noisy foreigners because everywhere here is so noisy that you can’t complain about the tourists. This being said there is a lack of tourism throughout India because of the terrorist attacks so the places we went were not too overwhelming. For the entire trip we took a small bus around, which looked like a van. We spent way too much time in the bus but as others said before I remember mostly the stuff I saw not the bus rides. So in Udaipur we saw a nice Hindu temple, the city palace (which still has a royal family living there), and a garden with over 700 fountains. The next day we drove to Jodhpur which is another city in Rajasthan. The thing that amazes me about India is how every city has so many people, you come to a city expecting a population of maybe 50,000 and it has 500,000 people. I went to a city in Maharashtra that I had never heard of and it had 2 million people. Just something that is a little different from Canada where such a city would be one of the biggest in the country. On the drive to Jodhpur we stopped for a couple hours in Ranakpur to see the most amazing temples around. The temples were Jain temples you may remember the Jain religion which I mentioned in a previous post. The Jain’s can’t kill anything you are normally not allowed to wear your leather belt into the temples but this one was a big tourist hot spot. No words (or even pictures for that matter) could ever do justice to how amazing the temple was. It had 1,444 marble pillars each of which were carved differently. The ceiling also had amazing designs which often used different layers for effect. There were too many amazing things about this temple to start naming a few but I will try. There was a huge basement where they would hide the gods during the Mogul attacks; there are two 108kg bells which were not ringing when we went but can be heard a very long distance away, the temple construction started in 1446 and took more than 50 years to complete, and the temple was nominated as one of the final 77 new wonders of the world. Every time I turned around I was amazed again. Although I could never describe how awesome the temple was I hope you get the idea. We drove to Jodhpur and stayed the night there. In the morning we visited the palace in Jodhpur which again still has the royal family living there but it has also been converted to a hotel. We visited the museum there which was interesting but also boring. It gave us an idea how the royal family actually lives from playing polo to sipping on French wine they have a pretty good life. After visiting the palace we drove to Jaisalmer. Jaisalmer is a really cool place it is right in the desert like 80 km from Pakistan and has some really cool sights, sounds and smells. The sights we saw include a water tank surrounded by important buildings and temples, the Golden Fort which is the only fort in India which still has village people living there, and the city sprawling at the base of the fort. Other notable sights that we saw which were funny were the couple shops that were advertizing ‘CHILD BEER’ not chilled beer, also some little girl who did an insane tightrope act, and all the camels which walked through the streets with ease. The sounds included people trying to get our attention so they could show us crap we don’t need, shrieks after jumping into the ice cold swimming pool at the hotel, and complaints after receiving the sub par meal at the hotel restaurant. Smells were mostly bad but not always from the seemingly endless supply of cow dung to the fresh aroma from the German bakery which we had lunch at. The afternoon we arrived in Jaisalmer we went for a swim and also visited a silversmith and saw how they make the jewelry. The day we visited the Golden fort and Jaisalmer city we also went for a one day camel safari which was incredible. So we left Jaisalmer in the afternoon and took the bus for an hour to the Thar desert in the far western part of India like 50km away from the Pakistan border. We were so close to Pakistan that every couple of hours you would hear and often see an Indian Air Force fighter jet patrolling the border. I think the Air Force patrol was more for show but the relations between India and Pakistan are not the best right now and it was really weird actually seeing the effects of that. So we took the bus to the desert and immediately went on a camel ride for about an hour we rode to some very nice sand dunes and stopped. During the halt we all played in the sand for an hour or more, it was so much fun. Jumping off and running down the sand dunes. We then watched the picture perfect sunset together and rode back. It was an amazing experience. When we got back to the camp we had a surprisingly good meal and watched a cultural dance/music program put on by 5 village people who lived a 5km walk away from the camp. In the evening there was also a campfire. The desert gets pretty cold at night actually and I had to put on my tuque. The next day we woke up early and I had a hot shower then watched the sunrise. The next day we drove much of the day but when we went back to Jodhpur and visited a pretty cool fort known as Menrangarh Fort. It had never been captured and was really interesting in general. Information was given on how the royal people spent time, to the design of the fortress, to the history behind it and finally to how prevalent opium was used with the royal family. Also from the fortress you could see one of the marvels of Indian architecture known as the Blue City where all the houses which were owned by Brahmans (which is a caste of Hindus) were painted blue on the walls which faced the fortress. Also, being modern times, many houses which weren’t owned by Brahmans were painted too so it gave a really amazing effect looking down on this blue city. In the evening we got time for shopping and came back to the hotel for dinner and sleeping. The food throughout the trip was very good generally as it was at hotels for breakfast and dinner. The next day we drove to Jaipur. Jaipur is the capital of Rajasthan and was a pretty cool city although it was pretty busy. Like many Indian cities there is a new city and an old city the old Jaipur is known as the pink city as most of the city, including the surrounding walls, are painted a pinkish orange colour. There are many theories for the pink colour some say it goes back to the architect of the city who was devoted to Lord Shiva (a Hindu god) whose favorite colour was the 'terra cotta' colour which is there at present, and another theory is that the city was painted to welcome the British king Edward VII as pink is the traditional colour of hospitality. Jaipur was the first city in India to enjoy rigorous town planning and it shows in the wide straight avenues that divide the city into nine sectors which reflect the nine divisions of the universe according to the Indian horoscope. We stayed two nights in Jaipur at a nice hotel. The first afternoon we arrived and then went to an ethnic theme park called ‘Chokhi Dhani’ for the evening festivities. There were lots of cool things there like what people normally associate with India if they don’t know how advanced the country actually is. For example there was an elephant ride, mendhi (the brown designs on girl’s hands and my bicep), magicians, traditional dance, a contortionist, and a head massage. The head massage was kinda painful, the elephant ride was ok but the guy hurt the elephant and the whole atmosphere was great. We also ate a traditional dinner there which many people didn’t like but I didn’t mind it. The next day we did the sightseeing of Jaipur. We first saw Amber fort which was interesting even after seeing so many forts. It had a few palaces in the fort one of which was covered in mirrors and coloured glass another of which was cooled by the presence of marble walls and channels which water flowed through. Royal people sure knew how to live and it is genius what the people could do so long ago with such little technology to make their lives more comfortable. Also in Jaipur we saw Jantar Mantar a medieval observatory, it was absolutely amazing how the solar and lunar measuring devices were and still are so accurate. One Sundial, which happens to be the largest in the world, was accurate to within 5 seconds. Your watch may be wrong but this sundial isn’t. There were also some other crazy other lunar measuring devices and some devices which apparently measure how hot the summer will be and when the monsoon will arrive. I didn’t understand most of what the guide explained but whatever it was very interesting. We chose not to go to the city palace as we had already been to a few palaces which were apparently very similar. This palace did have the two largest silver objects in the world though and we missed those but whatevs. The silver objects were massive urns (760lbs each) which held water from the Ganges so the king had a constant supply of Ganges water to drink. We went back to the hotel in the afternoon and had some time for shopping. I went with another German exchange student and some guy talked nonsense to us for at least ½ an hour and wasted a bunch of our time by taking us to his overpriced silver shop. It was a terrible time. We came back to the hotel by bicycle rickshaw for an amazing dinner and bed.
I have gone a long time on this post but still have more to cover so I will post this followed by pictures and in the next few days I will continue with the North Trip and beyond. I still have to describe the Taj Mahal, Delhi, and river rafting on the Ganges so stay tuned.
Also Mom, please don’t give me such big guilt trips about not posting so often I am having the time of my life.