| Submitted by: Mark R. Leeper and Evelyn C. Leeper United States |
| Submission Date: 07 February 2005 |
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He talked to us a
bit and looked at the latest edition of the Lonely Planet guide to see if it
still recommended his book about Jaiselmer--it does, but it doesn't mention
his museum. I guess at Rs5 each it's considered too expensive for the
really budget traveler. The museum is about five nine-foot by twelve-foot
rooms (three meters by four meters) but not bad for a private collection.
Next on the tour is the fort, so we walked into the city and found our
way (with some difficulty through the twisty streets) to the entrance. This
fortification was built in the 1200s not to surround only a palace, as in
Jodhpur, but also houses. Forts seem often to be know by the color of their
stone. This is the Golden Fort since it is made of yellow sandstone. You
follow a long rampway to enter the fort. It took ten minutes to climb into
the fort, and in that time we were hit on by a count of thirty-one hawkers.
That is a little over one every twenty seconds, though some take longer than
others to disengage from. Most you can ignore and walk by or just say,
Nay. Others are more persistent and take forty seconds or more to be rid
of. The heat, the hawkers, and our advancing age--let's admit it--makes
walking around here extremely fatiguing. But of the three, by far the worst
are the hawkers.
At the end of this climb and gauntlet was a huge open square, the town
square of the fort. Naturally there were vendors here as well, selling
textiles and puppets in a very colorful display. Here is also the palace,
standing at the highest point of the fort, but we saw it only from the
outside. Instead we walked up and down the streets, seeing the houses of
common people, often with fancy stonework. We stopped and watched some boys
playing cricket. It is surprising how much of the British ways are still
around.
We had lunch at 8th July, an odd restaurant with no Indian dishes at
all, alas. It specializes in tourist food and so has some Chinese food as
well as things like veggie burgers, pizza, and marmite. Mark had Maha-
veggie egg-cheese burger, a strange but very tasty sandwich. Evelyn had a
veggie burger. We broke another health rule by eating the tomato slices it
came with. We had been warned not to eat raw vegetables. (Evelyn says if
we followed all the rules we had been given, we would starve. Buy mineral
water only in pharmacies. Don't drink the local sodas. Don't drink
lassi or eat yoghurt. Don't eat raw vegetables. She goes on to say, In
the 1926 film version of THE TEN COMMANDMENTS, there is a section set in
modern times in which someone breaks all ten commandments. I'm starting to
feel like that--we're breaking more rules than we're following, I suspect.)
Mark also had a fruit smoothie, and it also was very good. One of the books
recommended their apple pie, so we shared a piece. It isn't what we think
of as apple pie. It was more like hot mashed apples and spice in a kind of
bread. Nevertheless it was quite tasty.
Actually, it might have been the lassi and the yoghurt that protected
us from stomach problems. Yoghurt and bananas are supposedly both old cures
for diarrhea and we ate a lot of yoghurt and bananas.
Evelyn is still wondering what significance 8th July has. Since the
restaurant is run by people from someplace in Central Asia, it probably not
named for the birthdays of Roone Arledge, King Edgar of England, Percy
Grainger, Vitaly Ivanovich Sevastianov, or Ferdinand, Graf von Zeppelin; the
anniversary of Warren G. Harding; the Russian victory over the Swedes at
Poltava; or the departure of Vasco da Gama's ships from Lisbon, but that
doesn't say what it was named for. Can anyone help?
We did see a boy filling Bisleri bottles from a water tap and capping
them. It could be innocent or it could be a gotcha for some tourist, the
spider spinning his web for the unway fly.
We walked around a bit more after lunch, looking at some of the
havelis, or homes of the merchants of times past. The outsides of these are
decorated with fancy carving and grill work in yellow sandstone. Inside
they are reportedly plain, but most are either private homes not open to
tourists or shops trying to sell things to tourists. Even the shops across
the streets from the havelis try to cash in on them by offering to let you
use the second floor of their shops to look across into the havelis. We
tried to follow a map to find the Salam Singh Haveli, but could not rid
ourselves of someone who insisted that we see it from the upper floors of
his carpet museum--admission free. (He said the carpet museum was sponsored
by the government. We saw several other carpet museums as we walked; we
hadn't realized that Jaiselmer had more museums than New York, but most were
carpet museums or handicraft museums. And all of them--and a lot of shops
too--are Recognized by the Government. Sounds impressive, doesn't it?
Evelyn asked Mark just what this meant and Mark said it means they pay their
taxes.)
The carpet museum's proprietor's pestering chased us away before we
could see the haveli well. After that we could not find the next site as
the map and streets just did not seem to match. The more we looked, the
more we were harassed by hawkers and kids asking for pens. Eventually we
gave up and went back to the hotel. Actually Jaiselmer must be very
liberated. Until Jaiselmer just about all hawkers have been men. Beggars
have been evenly distributed but hawkers have been male. Here for the first
time have we been chased--yes, that's the right verb, chased--by women
hawkers selling jewelry.
The hotel was a nice place to rest. It had a nice grassy center
courtyard, a few shops, and an open-air bar and restaurant. The Lonely
Planet guide describes it as decorated to look like a prince's desert camp.
Well, that may be an exaggeration, but it is quite nice architecturally.
We stayed in the room behind locked doors where nobody could try to
sell us anything. We left only to try to book a safari for the next day.
First we asked how much a three-hour jeep ride in the desert would be. It
was Rs600 for the two of us. We thought the jeep driver earlier had
mentioned a much cheaper price, so we went out to find a phone to call him,
accidentally stumbling upon a haveli we couldn't find earlier, and
eventually finding a phone. But the company wouldn't quote a price over the
telephone--we had to come in to discuss it. Well, this seemed suspicious.
We tried to price the trip at another place, but it was closed. (Oh, we
also tried to use USA Direct to call home, but it doesn't work from public
phones. That makes it pretty useless for travelers here.)
We returned to the hotel and after farbling a while, decided to book
the trek. But when Mark went to the desk he said camel trek and that was
only Rs350 for two. So we booked that for tomorrow. We also asked about
where to hear local music and were told our hotel would have a puppet show
at 7 PM and local music from 8 to 10 PM.
Evelyn writes, The whole subject of the camel trek is a touchy one. I
had been reading about Jaiselmer and how the thing to do was to go out into
the desert on a camel. The best treks were at least three or four days but
there were some half-day trips. Since the latter was all we would have time
for anyway, I figured that would be good. And I had thought that Mark had
been reading up and was expecting to go on a trek as well. But this was not
the case. So when I first mentioned booking a camel trek, his reaction
was, 'A camel trek?! What's this about a camel trek?' It turned out that
Mark was not as eager as I to go on a camel trek and one might say he was
even negative on the idea. But talking to people who had been, and hearing
it was only three hours out and back made him enough less negative that he
was willing to do it for my sake. (He's such a sweetie!)
Actually, Mark says, I had seen how elephants were treated in Thailand
when we took an elephant trek. I lost his taste for entertainment at the
expense of an animal, at least where there was a high probability the animal
would not be treated well.
We arrived at 7 PM for the puppet show but apparently misunderstood the
concept of a puppet show. This was a puppet show with show as in Boat
Show. (Or as Evelyn said, The puppet show consisted of them showing us the
puppets and then asking how much we would be willing to pay.) Nothing was
done with the puppets except attempt to sell them to us. Us and nobody
else. We don't understand the rules, but three times they came to us to
demonstrate the puppets and ask how much we would pay. Three times we said
we were not interested, but there was a sales pitch each time and we were
certainly not encouraging them.
There really was a folk music show with instruments, song, and dance of
the area. Thank goodness. We didn't want people coming to the table to ask
us how much we would pay for a dancer. The show started at 8 PM but went
only to about 9:15 PM. Then they decided there were not enough people left
listening or tipping and the music stopped. (Evelyn thinks the people left
to escape the bugs, which were moving in.) What we heard was entertaining,
though Evelyn liked the instrumental music better than the dancing. And it
was certainly better than the other entertainment option--a theater a block
away showing Stephen King's SILVER BULLET. (Evelyn wonders if they added
songs.)
The early end did give us a chance to catch up on our logs.
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We had quite a comfortable night in spite of the fact
the mattress was only about two inches thick. Mark was afraid he had
awakened in the middle of the night but when he found his flashlight, it was
5:53 AM. He spent the early hours of the morning writing the preface to
this trip log. We set out about 9 AM to see the Jain temples. We stopped
for breakfast at 8th July, prices in our hotel restaurant being outrageously
high (Rs15 for a soda costing Rs7 elsewhere). Walking there Evelyn was
struck by how lost one can feel on first arriving in a town and how quickly
one can find one's way around.
Mark's cold seems to be getting worse with time. It is just a nose
that has to be blown several times an hour. So far the 100% probability of
digestive problems has failed to materialize. We still drink water only
from bottles. We have cut out the Band-ade and drink any brand of mineral
water with a sealed cap. We have not bought food from street vendors,
though people say at least there you can see the kitchen. It may well be
that we have built up a resistance to travel stomach disorders. Mark
doesn't think he really wants to test this hypothesis, however.
After breakfast we walked to the Jain temples and got some pictures of
the outsides. Mark thinks the outside are probably the most interesting
part. Inside is symbolic sculpture that we do not understand very well. At
least it was not explained well at Osian. We probably should have done more
study before the vacation. (Also, cameras were not allowed inside but there
was no place reputable to leave them outside.) Evelyn found it interesting
that leather was prohibited inside Jain temples but a very high percentage
of the souvenirs sold just outside are made of leather.
We also found a bastion with a cannon (called in the guides the place
of the cannon) and got some impressive views of the city. We walked around
the inside of the walled fort for an hour or two.
It is tough to judge here when you see young children if you are
looking at a boy or a girl. |
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