First, at dusk one day in Jaipur we went to the Temple of the Sun God. The temple was set in a pretty cool, crazy canyon. Vines and trees climbed their way around the buildings, and the temples were intricately carved and painted different pastel colors. If you picture a sun god temple in India (or if you can't, imagine something from an Indiana Jones movie), this was it.
The temple had two notable inhabitants. First, the sun god worshippers. They chanted songs and banged drums. At sundown, they formed a little, raucus parade and marched from one end of the temple complex to the other to make an offering to the sungod.
Coexisting with the worshippers were thousands of monkeys. They made a similar pilgrimmage jusyt after dusk from one end of the temple to the trees at the other. They also played with each other, climbed up and all around the temples, and pretty much had their way with things. We fed them portions of banana. They would come up, look at me and the banana a bit suspiciously, then reach out and grab it with their hand before scampering off a few feet to eat it. Really cool. And amazingly, no tourists - just us, worshippers, monkeys, and about a dozen military police there for no reason.
Second, I also took a day trip to Pushkar. This tiny (pop. 15,000) desert oasis town was once a major Hindu pilgrimmage site, as pilgrims would come and bathe in the bathing ghats in the lake in the center of town. Now, the town is a terrible mess, rundown, rancid, full of little shops for skeptical tourists.
The lone highlight were the camels. There are camels everywhere in Rajasthan, and we saw this caravan crossing the highway on the way.
The process of riding camels was also fairly interesting.
First, we went to a "travel office" in town and set up a camel ride. Then we took a guy from the travel office in our car to a pretty nice house just outside of town. This was the camel owner's house, and there were 3 camels tied up in his yard. When his two employees saw us approaching, they began to saddle and prepare the camels.
We got on the camels and set off for our sand dune ride. First, we set off down the residential paved street, on camels with our two guides. Then we turned and walked a bit down a major paved road, joining traffic with other bikes and cars. Finally we turned off and went off into the dunes.
Along the way, we had the following conversation with one of the guides who spoke english.
"My boss is a very rich man. He owns 10 camels, 20 bikes, and 1 car. He also has 2 wives."
"Two wives?"
"Yes, the first one could not bear him children. So he got a second one who gave him two sons."
"Oh. I see."
Riding the camels in the dunes was fairly fun, but since it is monsoon season the dunes are fairly green. More dry fields than sandy dunes. Still fairly cool, but we rode for about 1.5 hours. About 30 minutes is plenty of camel riding for me.
1 comment:
Um, have you seen Outbreak?
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