| Submitted by: Mark R. Leeper and Evelyn C. Leeper United States |
| Submission Date: 07 February 2005 |
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Eventually he put
the bite on us for a pack of Dentyne gum and a magazine we'd gotten on the
plane. He was incredibly persistent and annoying in his comments. (Evelyn
says, He didn't like Michael Jackson because he was 'half man, half woman.'
I'm not sure what he meant by this, but I wasn't in the mood to try to raise
his consciousness in any case. I should have said, 'Oh, like Ardhanari.'
(Ardhanari is Siva in a half-male, half-female form.) But you never think
of these come-backs until later.)
Tired of being hustled, we retreated to the lawn of the tourist
bungalow, rested, and wrote. Around 6:30 PM we went to the railway station.
We were missing dinner so Mark bought some sandwich cookies--mango-flavored.
There was so little frosting it could not hold the halves together. Just a
minor gotcha.
Mark writes, Earlier, Evelyn had expressed reservations about going to
the market because she thought we'd be fighting off hawkers and hustlers. I
expressed similar reservations about going on a camel trek and Evelyn
ignored them. I think this was our first disagreement of the trip, at least
the first of any length. We waited a while in the first-class lounge and
then Evelyn suggested we try the foreign tourist waiting room. The latter
proved a good idea. We got to talk to a wide range of tourists, from one
woman who wanted out of India as fast as she could manage. She had had
several bad experiences, culminating in a camel trek in which she got sick
two and a half days into a seven-day trek. She went back and the guide
stole her provisions. I didn't get the full story, but it didn't sound very
good.
We spent some time talking to an Israeli CPA from Tel Aviv. His
brother had visited Southeast Asia and loved it so he had come to India.
Mark told him politely that India is a lot more hostile than, say, Thailand.
It turned out that he was just loving India. There was always another
mystery to solve about why India was the way it was. He also said the
reason there were so many Israeli tourists in India was that India was close
to Israel (a five-hour flight) and very cheap.
Mark said he was going to ask a political question. Evelyn sort of
groaned but he went ahead. What do you think are the chances for peace now
that the PLO had acknowledged Israel and vice versa? It was a question he
seemed very happy to answer. He was very optimistic. He said only about 2%
of Israelis opposed the treaty, though that 2% had gotten a lot of news
coverage. All Israelis need is to feel relatively safe and they will have a
lot of good will rather than fear of the Palestinians. He thinks as long as
they don't start bringing in heavy armaments, the Palestinians should rule
themselves. This guy seemed awfully open and friendly. Mark said he was
hoping to see him on the train, but he was going second class to meet more
Indians.
Evelyn had asked at the Enquiry desk which our compartment was. It
turns out you can't tell by looking at the ticket. The actual seat
assignment takes place after you buy the ticket. That makes things
difficult.
At 10 PM we boarded the train. We had a tough time finding the first-
class carriage since it was a long train and we started going the wrong way.
We found it, though. Ours was a half-sized compartment and was for only
two. We waited for the conductor to come by and check our tickets--fending
off a very persistent mineral water seller--but he never did. Finally we
locked the door and went to sleep (about midnight).
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Mark had been somewhat traumatized by one very bad
sleeper-car trip in Malaysia. He says this was the second least comfortable
sleeper he'd ever had, but it still was not unbearable. It started too hot,
but he drenched a T-shirt and wore that under his shirt and it was a lot
more comfortable.
During the night Mark was attacked by mosquitos and had to put on Deet
left over from our Amazon trip. Later it got very cold in the car. Evelyn,
who had started off wearing a T-shirt, added a long-sleeved shirt and a
nylon windbreaker before thinking to close the window. Mark woke up three
or four times in the night, but usually fell right back asleep. By morning,
even though the windows had been closed for a lot of the night, dust had
blown big black rings around the bases of the mineral water bottles. It
also showed just where on Mark's arms he'd put Deet, which had collected the
dust.
As we traveled, the view out the window started really to look like
desert, with camels, dunes, and piles of some yellow fruit near the track
for long stretches. We never found out what the fruit was or why it was
there.
The events upon our arrival in Jaiselmer are a matter of some dispute,
so we'll give you both sides of the story.
Mark says, We pulled into the station. We got out. Someone called
out Narayan Niwas Hotel. Evelyn immediately identified us as wanting to go
there. I tried to stop her because I assumed this was just a commission
man. Evelyn was assuming this was a hotel service. 'Lose this guy,' I told
her. 'He's from the hotel. You'll see Narayan Niwas on his jeep or we
won't get in.' His jeep said 'Adventure Travel Agency.' 'Don't get in,' I
said. Evelyn got in. Blind obedience. There were a bunch of other
tourists in the jeep so Evelyn figured it was okay. The jeep sped off. I
tried to take a picture of the fort. 'Take pictures later,' snapped the
driver. The jeep stopped at Adventure Travel and the driver had all the
passengers but Evelyn and me get out. 'Are we IN IT!' I thought. He had
let all the other pigeons go to concentrate on his two prize pigeons.
'Narayan Niwas is very expensive,' he said. Oh, yeah. I'll just bet he
was sent by the Narayan Niwas. 'I have better hotel for you cheaper.' 'We
want to go to the Narayan Niwas.' We did and Evelyn checked the room.
Meanwhile I got a sales pitch for a safari. It turned out that either the
toilet didn't work or they had only air-cooled. 'See, expensive and no
good.' Okay, I thought. Let's see what he has. He took us to two
different hotels--one had no air conditioning and was full anyway; the other
was more expensive than the Narayan Niwas. We ended up being taken back to
the Narayan Niwas. We took the room with no air conditioning.
Mark continues, We went to the room since we'd been whisked away from
the railway station before we could book our train out. Another reason I
was unhappy was that Evelyn had suddenly changed the plan and trusted a
total stranger. It turned out we spent more for an air-cooled just okay
room than other people in the hotel spent for much nicer rooms.
Evelyn agrees that saying yes to the first person calling out Narayan
Niwas was foolish, but the guidebooks did say that many hotels sent jeeps
to the railway station to pick up guests, so this was not entirely out of
the question. In the end, she says, It seems to have worked out okay.
Yes, we paid more than some one else for a room, but hers was a single.
However, although the driver claimed that the hotel would make train
reservations for us, it turned out that we had to do that ourselves, so we
got an auto-rickshaw back to the railway station and then to the beginning
point of our tour. We got back to the railway station about 10 AM. There
were three Indians and an English couple ahead of us in line. Since we had
an hour before the reservations window closed, we figured we had plenty of
time. However, although we still don't know what the Indians were doing and
what the man behind the counter was doing, whatever it was, took about
thirty minutes after we arrived. (It seems as if Indians buying tickets
always take much longer than tourists--are they trying to decide where they
want to go based on the cost or what? Evelyn suggested that maybe it was a
mathematics puzzle where they had to cover every kilometer of track in the
Indian Railways system in as short a time as possible. By the way, Indian
Railways is the world's largest employer, with 1,600,000 employees--or 16
lakh employees, if you prefer. India even has different units of numbers.
Instead of the million and the billion, there is the lakh--100,000--and the
crore--10,000,000.)
We'd filled out the railway form and were waiting. A tourist with an
Indian driver or guide showed up. The guide filled out a form for the
tourist, walked to the front of the line, and shoved it inside the window.
Hey, this is a queue, one the English tourists said and pulled the form
and money back out and handed them back to the Indian guide. The Indian
guide walked around to the back of the queue, then up to the front on the
other side and tried to push the form in. Evelyn blocked him this time.
That didn't work so he went around the side and into the ticket office, but
the clerk at the desk threw him back out. And so it would go. He would try
to push the form and money in; we would block him. (The one time he did
manage to sneak it in, the clerk handed it back and told him it wasn't
filled in completely.) At one point he looked at Mark exasperatedly. In
India Indians should be #1, he explained helpfully, and wrote #1 on his
hand. However, he was out-numbered and blocked at each turn, so he pushed
into the line in front of two Indians behind us. (Clearly he was buying a
ticket for the tourist and had told him that he could get it done quickly.
He hadn't counted on the other tourists there being so impolite as to insist
that he wait his turn.)
One reason this was going so slowly was that this station was not
computerized like the others had been, so everything had to be looked up and
written down by hand in large ledger books and on forms in duplicate (or
maybe it was in triplicate). Our tickets cost Rs492, whereas coming here
they had been Rs510. Maybe you pay extra for a computerized ticket.
Well, finally we got done after about forty minutes in what looked like
a short queue. We started to leave and a goat limped by. The goat had
somehow backed into a bramble bush and had a two-foot piece of bramble bush
tangled in its coat. The driver held the goat and extracted the brambles.
Evelyn says the books say not to tip usually, but in this case he did a good
deed for the goat as well as waiting for us, so we tipped 25%.
From the railway station we went to Gadi Sagar Gate, the start of the
city tour in the Cadogan guide.
The city itself was founded in 1156 by Bhati Prince Jaisel. The name
means the Jaisel Oasis. As in Osian, the Jain merchants chose this as a
place to build some impressive temples. There were also huge merchant
mansions called havelis. Some of these were incredibly ornate with
filigree-like trellised balconies.
The Gadi Sagar Tank is an artificial lake that was used to hold water
for the oasis. The Cadogan guide says that it rarely has any water in it,
but it was full now. (The guide is a few years old; maybe things have
changed.) The lake was also full of frogs, at least near where we were--
hundreds of them small enough to run or skip on the surface. There is a
gateway to the tank donated by Talia, a singer and prostitute. The royal
family got in a tizzy that a prostitute would do such a thing and threatened
to pull down the gates. Talia put an image of Krishna on the gates and had
them turned into a temple. It's not nice to fool with Krishna.
Near the gate is a small folklore museum, the personal collection of
N. K. Sharma, who sits in the museum and welcomes people and shows off
objects and sells the guide to the city that he wrote. |
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