Amber Fort

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A second day in Jaipur gave us an opportunity for a later start once again – something that most kids appreciated, especially the two boys who stayed up late to watch a movie, forgot to set their alarm and failed to respond to repeated banging on their door when a teacher tried to wake them in the morning.  Eventually they surfaced and sheepishly entered the breakfast room, still rubbing sleep out of their eyes, just as the rest of us were finishing.  I think they’ll be better organised from here on!

Today’s main activity proved to be a very popular one – a visit to the historic Amer Fort, also known as the Amber Fort.  The fort is actually part fort and part palace.  It was the birthplace of Jodhaa, the Rajput princess who featured in the movie we watched at Daly College.  The fort is located atop a high hill overlooking the city of Jaipur. High defensive walls with ramparts and sentry towers snake over neighbouring hills in all directions, providing an impenetrable defence against marauders.  The Rajputs were of the warrior caste and their history is peppered with stories of great military leaders and their famous victories in battle.  The Amer Fort is rich in such history.

En route to the fort, we had a quick stop at the Water Palace, located in the middle of a man made lake.  Food and trinket vendors plied their trade all around us, as it is obviously a popular ‘photo opportunity’ spot for tourists.  You learn quickly how to give a ‘No, sorry I don’t need any’ response to every one who approaches you wanting to make a sale – colourful pens, jewellery boxes, postcards, camel leather shoes, little models of the Taj Mahal, etc.

We climbed the 206 steps to the fort.  It wasn’t an easy climb.  We often shared the path with the elephants that ferried tourists back and forth from the carpark to the fort at the top of the hill.  I know the kids would have loved to ride up there on the back of an elephant, but unfortunately there was the small matter of we teachers not seeking your signed consent for this prior to the trip to consider.  Nevertheless, we all loved watching the elephants as they lumbered past us one after the other.

Today at the fort we got a taste of mixing with large crowds.  No doubt we’ll face even larger ones tomorrow at the Taj Mahal.  There were a couple of Indian school groups touring the fort and many Europeans.  It was one of those times when I was glad we issued the kids with Ivanhoe tour shirts and hats because it was never difficult to spot them in the crowd or do a quick head count.  Whenever we came to a particular monument of note, the crowd was thick and you had to almost queue up if you wanted to arrange a group photo there.

The fort was massive.  The outer walls were very high, as were the huge entrance gates that the elephants passed through.  Inside the fort was a large open space, maybe some form of parade ground.  We explored the fort and adjoining palace for a couple of hours.  The design was a blend of Islamic in places such as the geometric layout of the gardens and Hindu in others, with the elephants and lotus flowers decorating the stone columns.

You can’t go anywhere with a driver or guide in India without him taking you to a shop, or more likely several shops.  There is no doubt he would be receiving a commission on all sales.  Even if you tell him that the students have shopped enough and don’t need to visit another, he will insist on just one more because ‘it is very good, this one’.  So after leaving the fort and hoping we would soon be heading off to Agra, we found ourselves going from one shop to the next.  Indian handicrafts shops are swarming with employees, so as soon as you walk in you will find one of them at your side placing a pair of shoes, a sari, a scarf or something similar in your hand and insisting you try it on in front of the mirror.  You don’t say No at first because it’s sort of a game and it’s also fun for a while.  Within minutes of entering each shop, our students were entering negotiations about prices, comparing one design with another, listening to stories of how the quality could not be surpassed anywhere else in the world.  It was good to watch.  We teachers were very impressed with the way our kids conducted their deals and all of them seem to have come away with souvenirs that will please the folks back home.  Of course, they never let you get away with only one item, so as soon as you pay for something and it is handed to someone to be wrapped, the salesman is now placing something else in your hand and explaining how you need to also buy one of these.  This is the time when you need to be a little assertive and insist that you really don’t need one.  The first shop we were taken to after leaving the fort was a camel leather shoe store originally owned by a man who had lived to ‘one hundred and thirty nine years old’ – I kid you not!

By the time we had exhausted all of the guide’s mates’ shops, including one that he himself owned, and then had lunch it was after 3pm and we were still in Jaipur.  We farewelled Vermal, our guide, whose company we had enjoyed and watched as he headed from the bus back to one of the shops – no doubt to collect the percentage of the sales that was now owing to him.  The road to Agra was a toll road, but we shared it with all forms of traffic, occasionally coming straight at us on our side of the road!  There were camels pulling carts, motorbikes carrying large milk churns strapped to the back of the riders, grain carts, small tray trucks so full of people that three or four would be standing on a narrow foothold at the back of the tray grimly hanging on as the vehicle travelled over the bumps and potholes.  I looked out my window just as we were leaving the outskirts of Jaipur and watched a man shoo three monkeys out of his backyard.  They scampered over the wall and down into the yard of another man’s house.

Leaving Jaipur so late meant that we travelled the last part of the journey in the darkness.  The closer we got to Agra, the more trucks we encountered on the road, sometimes passing up to fifteen or twenty lined up along the roadside.  There were many carts laden to the brim with sacks of grain or potatoes slowing traffic down, hard to see in the dark until you were right upon them, as they had no lights.  We passed through many kilometres of grain fields early in the trip, then countless brick factories with their tall chimneys belching foul smoke into the air.

We didn’t arrive in Agra until 8.30pm.  It had been a longer day than we anticipated.  Back in the rooms we discovered that the hotel’s wi fi was not working, so apologies for not receiving this blog post immediately.  We’ll be in Delhi tomorrow night and I will post it from there.

Jaipur

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Our first night in a deluxe motel was a nice change. So was rising for breakfast at 9.00am, rather than getting up at 6.00am each day for yoga at the college. It was good to see everyone well rested at the buffet breakfast, following our really busy time at Daly.

Jaipur is often known as the Pink City after one of its rulers decreed that the city should be painted in an earthy pink hue many years ago. It is one of the most popular tourist destinations in Rajasthan because it is steeped in both culture and history.

We visited the Jantar Mantar, the astronomical observatory constructed over 280 years ago which features a number of massive marble and stone instruments used to measure time and position in space. We had two guides today, Jayant and Vermal. Vermal demonstrated the accuracy of one of the instruments – telling the time to within twenty seconds from the position of the shadow made by the sun on the marble measurement gauge.

Many Hindus believe in astrology. At the Jantar Mantar there was a separate measuring instrument for each sign of the zodiac. People would provide the date and time of their baby’s birth and the location where the child was born, and in return a horoscope would be provided for the child that listed auspicious dates for future reference.

Our next stop was the City Palace, home of the current 16-year old Maharajah. We actually saw the young man being driven through the Elephant Gate (you can see it in one of the images here). The City Palace is also a museum showcasing the wealth and grandeur of the Rajput rulers of Jaipur since Maharajah Jai Singh founded the city in the 1700s. There was plenty to admire – the beautiful pink buildings, the finely embroidered costumes, the armour and weapons and the intricate hand-painted artworks on the ceiling.

Inside the palace we called in to the cottage crafts pavilion, where some of Rajasthan’s finest painters, weavers and jewellers ply their trades. A trio of painters of Mughal miniatures showed us how it was done, using single-haired brushes and paints made in front of us from natural materials, including stone and vegetable matter. A weaver invited students to sit behind the loom and add a couple of rows to the carpet he was making. The quality of Indian cottage crafts is usually very good and the students made this their first extended shopping trip of the tour. Quite a good deal of money changed hands.

A snake charmer entertained us as we left the palace. His cobra slithered from its basket and writhed backwards and forwards in what appeared to be an attempt to escape. He grabbed it by the tail. Eventually it turned its gaze to the snake charmer and began to raise its head and flatten its hood as it swayed back and forth. It cost me a 100-rupee tip, but it was probably worth it as snake charmers are part of the folklore of the India of old.

A late lunch was followed by a visit to Albert Hall, now a rather dusty old museum that contains not only lots of early Indian artefacts, but also Egyptian mummies and Greek and Roman vases. Unfortunately, little thought has been given to how the exhibits might be displayed in a more appealing manner. Museums like this in Melbourne had been and gone by end of the 1960s. Albert Hall is also of interest as it was designed by the architect who designed the administration building at Daly College.

The kids seemed to be quite tired after walking so far, so we decided to go home and let them rest for a couple of hours. When we sat down to dinner in the hotel’s restaurant later this evening, they were all looking much fresher. Tomorrow morning we visit the Amber Fort, which sits atop the hill that overlooks Jaipur, and then we leave immediately for Agra, home of the Taj Mahal. The new toll road will allow us to get there in good time without having to battle the busy, horn-blasting traffic we’ve been caught in from time to time.

Ranthambore Express

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For once we were all up and about when the Moslem mosque alongside the school began its daily 5.00am call to prayer.  The now familiar call had just begun as we piled the last of our cases onto the bus and headed for Indore Railway Station.  India has one of the world’s most extensive rail networks.  It dates back to the British Raj and the rail lines criss-cross almost every part of the subcontinent.  Today over 20 million people, almost the entire population of Australia, ride the rails in India every day.  My first train journeys in India were thirty years ago.  Nothing seems to have changed since then – in fact, none of the trains seem to have had a coat of paint since then either.

When you arrive at the station, regardless of the time of day, the platforms are busy with people coming and going, carrying oversized loads, buying and selling goods, sleeping under dirty blankets, or sipping chai tea.  Once we had carted our heavy bags up the stairs and then down the other side onto the platform it was a struggle to push our way through the crowd to our carriage.

In India a passenger list is always pasted on the side of the carriage alongside the door, allocating berths.  Vijay and our new guide Jayant got hold of the list and tried to help us make sense of it.  A narrow passage runs down the centre of a carriage.  On one side are regular seats by a window with a bunk berth above them.  These are the favoured berths because there is plenty of room for you to stretch your legs.  Opposite are booths with three tiers of bunks on each side.  If you are allocated to a top bunk (which you essentially share with any cabin luggage – your suitcase remains on the floor), you will find yourself lying flat on your back staring at a ceiling that is only centimetres above you.  If you are a tall person, you’ll have all sorts of trouble getting in and out of a top bunk.

We had been allocated a couple of complete booths where we could all be together, but the rest of us were spread out along the carriage interspersed with the Indian public, the majority of whom speak no English.  This presents no problem other than it is sometimes a little awkward to ask someone if they could move their leg over or shift their case for you to climb into your bunk.

It took a little time to figure out how to best arrange ourselves around the carriage, but eventually we figured it out and carted our bags onto the train.  We farewelled our dear friend Vijay as we boarded.  He handed me a bagful of DVDs of last night’s performance, one for every student, and also a Hindi language newspaper.  On the front page was a colour photo of our students dancing at the cultural assembly.

And click here to read a Times of India report on our performance

We stowed our heavy luggage, tucked away our backpacks and squeezed into our bunks.  As it was still only 6.00am, most students slept for a couple of hours. By about 8.30am, many were up and about, wandering up and down the passageway.  If there was a spare bunk or seat adjacent to a friend, many took the opportunity to occupy it until such time as someone boarded the train and took occupancy of it.  It’s now almost 4.00pm as I type this and some kids haven’t moved from their bunk all day.  They’ve taken the opportunity to stretch out and sleep, read or write in their journals.  Others, however, have treated the train journey as an extended game of musical chairs, regularly swapping seats and moving from booth to booth.

If you spend the journey looking out the window, you will see lots of rural and small town India.  Most of the trip has been within the desert state of Rajasthan.  There is poverty here, plenty of it, but nowhere near as much as we witnessed on the drive to Mandu.  The houses are bigger and sturdier, there are more signs of affluence.  But the farms all look very dry and tractors are still a rarity.  In most fields you can see people harvesting grain by hand.  It won’t be long now before we start seeing camels – lots of them.  It doesn’t look like it’s going to rain for quite some time.

Rajasthan is very flat, with high rocky outcrops spread across the countryside. Upon the hilltops you will see the occasional fort.  Its location presented the perfect place to post sentries who could see the dust of the approaching enemy when the horses were still quite distant.

The train stops at stations for quite a long time – 10-20 minutes in some cases.  People get off the train to purchase food and newspapers from vendors on the platform, then reboard the train.  On the platform women are dressed in brightly coloured saris and men are dressed in grubby white dhotis and red and orange turbans.  Cows and goats wander along the platform.  At each stop food vendors, including the chai wallahs (tea vendors), climb aboard and walk up and down the carriages hawking their wares until they get off after a few station stops, presumably to peddle their goods again on the next train going back the other way.

There won’t be many photos from this journey.  There’s not a lot to photograph, though I wish I’d had my camera out when a man just walked past me with the largest bucket of water I think I’ve ever seen.  Despite this, there are likely to be plenty of memories and even a few good stories that come out of this eleven hour rail trek across Rajasthan.  Remember to ask your son or daughter when they get home.  Just don’t ask them to describe the squat toilets – the less said about them, the better!

Update:  We rolled into Jaipur Junction Railway Station at about 5.15pm.  The platform was teeming with people and we had a real struggle on our hands to make a path through them as a single group as we headed towards the station exit and the bus awaiting us in the carpark.  Upon arrival at the hotel we decided not to try to do anything else for the evening. Everyone needed a hot shower and a chance to lie down on a proper bed.  We ate a good buffet meal at 8.00pm, then attended a puppet show on the hotel lawn.  Some stayed to barter for the handmade puppets while others traipsed off to bed.