Singh
Hotel Sai-Niwas
75 Nav Ghat
Udaipur (313001)
Telephone: 0294 24909
It may be tough to get an auto-rickshaw to go there, as Singh says
auto-rickshaw drivers don't like him (which almost certainly means that he
does not pay them a commission and add it to the bill). If need be, go
instead to the City Palace gate, walk straight away from the gate and take
the alley to your left. At the end of the alley go right, down some steps,
and there should be swinging doors on your left. The neighborhood is safe,
but no better or cleaner than you'd expect in India. Once you pass the
swinging doors the inside of the hotel is clean and spacious. Singh says
the prices go up each year, but we expect he will give you your money's
worth. You might mention Mark and Evelyn Leeper.
Evelyn says, I'm glad we did Udaipur towards the end of our trip; it's
the best place we've been so far and leaves a much more pleasant memory
than, say, Agra.
We talked for a while with Singh and went up, wrote a while, and went
to bed.
|
Mark finally had stomach problems about 1 AM. Not
too serious. He woke up about 6 AM, went out on the balcony, and wrote.
Mark had Indian Wheatena for breakfast and we got the bill for our
stay. As we said, it was less than we expected.
After breakfast, we went out up Burning Garbage Lane to Cow Dung Alley
to the main street. Our only real sight of the day was the Jagdish Mandir.
This is a temple to Vishnu atop a high stairway flanked by stone elephants.
(Luckily, Evelyn's ankle is much better in the mornings and she could make
this climb.) We checked our shoes and the boy checking them said we should
visit his art school. Mark theorizes, This town must have a very good
geography course. When I have told people I was Finnish, I was told the art
school was going to show its art in Helsinki. When I was Canadian for
someone else, the art show was going to be in Toronto. If I am from the
United States, the school is showing its art in New York. If I am Dutch,
the show moves to Amsterdam. That shows really moves around. This is the
country of a billion lies ... a day.
This temple was built by Jagat Singh. The most striking feature is a
Garuda bird statue. The interior was impressive, but temples here always
seem small inside. That is because relative to churches, synagogues, and
mosques, they *are* small inside. They don't need to be large since there
is no congregation; there is no one time when all the faithful gather
together to worship as a unit. Just another interesting difference.
After the temple we walked in the streets. We bought some souvenirs
for our groups at work and some cloth paintings. The paintings, of course,
required bargaining. Evelyn doesn't like this game, but Mark is not too bad
at it and sort of enjoys it. Somebody once said that after *** all animals
are sad. Mark finds that after bargaining he usually is also. I guess any
price that they are willing to accept makes me think I paid too much.
Evelyn thinks that another problem with shopping was that most of the
stuff wasn't worth buying. The textiles all reminded me of my college days
when Indian-print bedspreads were de rigueur. In fact, most of the crafts
work suffered from the fault of looking reasonable in its own milieu but
looking trashy and/or ridiculous back home. (Someone once wrote that buying
folk clothing was a waste of money unless you were in the theater or went to
a lot of costume parties.) And even if we saw something worth getting, we
would have to bargain for it and I hate that. I can do okay (I think) on
rickshaw fares because both sides are working under a time constraint and
also there are a lot of other 'vendors' right there that I can turn to for
exactly the same thing. But Mark seems to enjoy bargaining--and is
certainly much better at it than I am.
Back to the hotel for more writing, ankle-resting, packing, and check-
out. We sat in the lobby for a while reading. Then we said Namascar and
left. First stop was the Mayur, a restaurant opposite the Jagdish Temple.
It had been a five-minute walk to the restaurant that morning, but now we
were carrying our belongings. Somehow that brings the hawkers to feeding
frenzy. Either auto-rickshaw drivers are stupid or they think that we are.
They will see us walk past a dozen other auto-rickshaws waiting for
customers and then run up to us and ask if we want an auto-rickshaw. What
do they expect--that we'll suddenly say, Gee, what a great idea! I wonder
why we didn't think of that? And kids follow you laughing and making
comments in Hindi. Shopkeepers see you walking slowly and assume it will be
easier to get you into their stores.
Slowly we fought our way to the restaurant.
Mark tries now as much as possible to eat Indian-style. That is, your
sole utensil is a piece of bread. You tear off pieces of bread and pick the
pieces out of your dish and pick up sauce with your bread. You do all of
this pretending your left arm does not exist. Tearing bread one-handed
assumes you pinch a bit of the bread with your thumb and index finger and
push the main body of the bread away with your middle finger. You fold the
piece of bread in half--still one-handed--pinch a vegetable, then eat this
small sandwich.
The menu was funny. Very often you see funny fractured English in
India. This restaurant served stuffed tamota and potato onion friend.
Would you eat a friend? Mark had paneer matar and a mango lassi; Evelyn had
iddly sambar and a coffee lassi. It came to all of Rs50--why don't the
Indian restaurants at home charge this way?
They had a permanent sign saying Video showing 8 PM tonight:
OCTOPUSSY. That is the James Bond film with a big piece in Udaipur.
Mark told Evelyn our next task was to find an auto-rickshaw. Mark
thinks we both knew the real trick would be to avoid being swarmed.
The first driver wanted Rs20.
Fifteen, Mark offered.
Twenty.
Mark went to another driver and asked, Fifteen? He said, Fifteen.
The first driver said, Okay, fifteen. Mark relates, Now by rights I
would have gone with the first driver who offered fifteen, but Evelyn had
already settled into the first auto-rickshaw and didn't want to move, fair
play or not. (Evelyn, on the other hand, felt that the first driver we had
negotiated with should have the chance of meeting that price, and he did
come down to Rs15.)
On the way Mark saw a cow that had been painted to be a traveling
billboard for Youth Fair '93. Whoever said cows were sacred in India?
The bus station turned out to be a ten-foot by fourteen-foot office.
(This is because we were taking a private bus, not a public one from the
actual bus station.) When we got there the driver said the ride was Rs20.
You said fifteen.
It was a joke, he explained helpfully.
He would not take Rs15. Mark got out and put Rs15 on the dashboard.
The number of different ways they have to try to shaft the tourist is
amazing!
We sat on the five-foot bench seat in the office. It was better than
an hour before our bus was due and Evelyn suggested that Mark walk around
and see what there was to discover. What he discovered was that there are
some inter-cultural constants like what sort of neighborhood you find bus
terminals in.
When you don't understand the language, a bus terminal, even one this
small, can be real chaos. Evelyn said we should carry on our bags rather
than checking them. We did, but it was a mistake soon regretted.
(Actually, later people said that taking our luggage on the bus was a good
idea. Sometimes when you let them put it on the roof it disappears before
the end of the trip.) Even without the luggage, ours would have been a
wrap-your-left-leg-around-your-neck sort of bus. Evelyn had Mark wedge her
suitcase into the overhead rack so we'd have some room to move. Mark had
figured seats 27 and 28 were ahead of 31 and 32. This proved wrong. Rather
than numbering each row left-to-right, the numbers snake in alternate rows
increasing from left to right and from right to left. We moved but left
Evelyn's suitcase overhead on the other side of the aisle. Eventually it
fell on some poor passenger and we had to take it and juggle it. This is
not an air-conditioned bus, but it does have reclining seats. Of course,
all the knobs had been stolen. That means whatever position you find your
seat back in is the position in which it stays. Marks was fully reclined, a
pain for him and the person behind him. Note: Anyone coming to India should
bring vice-grip pliers. That and a lot of pens. Oh, the pens are not to
give out, but for filling out an incredible number of forms. Every hotel we
were in required not only a registration form, but also a Foreign Tourist
Registration with name, age, country, passport and visa numbers, issue
locations, ... it's like filling out your income tax. God only knows what
they want all this for, but they probably figure they want to be ready if
the need arises.
Mark says, So here I was, half-reclined, listening to loud blaring
music in Hindi competing with the bus horn, packed in so tight I couldn't
move, looking at the bus decorated with pictures of baby Krishna (whose skin
color is blue) and, I just started laughing. Evelyn asked what I was
laughing at. 'This whole thing. This is it,' I said. 'The dream vacation
of a lifetime.' With film and developing, this trip will probably come in at
under $2000 for two (not counting airfare), and it is a major experience, so
I guess I shouldn't complain.
Mark slept a little, but woke up to a loud noise coming over a
loudspeaker. The bus had stopped at the Hotel Vijay Deep Bhim and the hotel
was playing a tape of someone reading the entire menu. Just so we'd know,
they went through it twice, at least. (We also got to hear it twice again,
for the next bus arriving.) We each had sodas and Evelyn had some Uncle
Chipps potato chips. Mark says, One taste and I could tell that these
chips were made with different cultural assumptions than chips made in my
society. They had a heavy oily flavor and were also a lot spicier than
chips I was used to. These were not going to be a great favorite with me.
|
What can one say about a seventeen-hour bus ride?
Well, for starters it was supposed to be only fifteen hours long. We left
late and arrived later, due in part to the fact that some time around 1 AM
the bus got into some sort of traffic jam in which there were long lines of
traffic waiting to go and traffic could go in one direction only. Sleep on
the bus was every bit as difficult and the bus was every bit as
uncomfortable as S. K. Singh had predicted, and the constant honking of
horns and seat problems didn't help. Still, we were better off than the
last few people to get on the bus, who got little rattan stools to sit on in
the aisle. (Of course, they ended up stretching out on the floor and
sleeping instead, so maybe they had it better.)
Mark woke about 6 AM and the early morning view was not as bad as from
the train, but not so good either. |
|
