Saturday morning, looking a little bleary-eyed, we loaded up into a big blue and yellow bus that said TOURIST in big bold letters across the top of the windshield. Funny, I hadn't known that we could be more conspicuous than we'd been already just traveling around in small cars as a large group of white people. So much for any hope of a decrease in stares.
We rumbled along in this monstrous bus for 5-6 hours along highways, main roads and 2-lane roads. You know my feelings about driving in Delhi. What I have now learned is that outside of cities, lanes are believed in a little more, but our bus driver was very confident in the fact that he was the biggest thing on the road and therefore could do as he pleased (for the most part) and everyone else would react to him or pay the price (the price being getting smushed by a gigantic bus full of Westerners - who maybe you were staring at in the first place and that's why you didn't react and are now smushed!). We knew we were out of Delhi and heading to new places when camels started appearing along the road - pulling carts, carrying riders, or pulling farm equipment in the fields.
We made it to Jaipur without smushing anyone/thing and settled into a beautiful hotel - we truly were living in the lap of luxury for India (and it would have been a very nice hotel in America, too). Some people went out to investigate the pool. I hunkered down in my room and read a chapter of my book (since in the bus I hadn't wanted to read because then I wouldn't have been able to look out the window) and promptly took a lovely nap :) Saturday night we went to a resort on the other side of Jaipur that has a "village" within it where one can eat a delicious authentic meal sitting on the floor of a hut with banana leaf plates and bowls, and then venture out of the hut to see dancers, puppet shows, and palm readers, get henna, look through a few shops, and ride a camel and/or elephant! It was like Indian DisneyWorld. We had a blast -though having a camel stand up and sit down when you are astride it is a little unsettling!- and I was thrilled to learn from Sunita that all of the proceeds go to the villagers who work there and their home village.
On Sunday, we visited the Amber Fort (known to Jaipur natives as the Red Fort, as opposed to the "real" Red Fort in Delhi) which was very big and very beautiful - and we got to ride up to it on elephants! Our guide took us to a workplace where the owner showed us how printing works on fabric, how carpets are made (some of them were exquisite!), and then had a large area of fabrics, bedspreads, tablecloths, sarees, and much more. All of the girls tried on sarees and explored the store (the two guys on our trip are doing their best, haha). The long day continued with a visit to the Maharaja's City Palace and observatory, but it was all very beautiful and worth the hot, sweaty exhaustion. We all tend to agree that, while some of the days have been very long, how can we not take advantage of doing these things while we are here in this place where we very likely will never be again?
Monday morning we hopped back in our blue and yellow machine and headed to Agra. We stopped on the way at a place called Fatehpur Sikri where the emperor Akbar had prayed for a child and his wife (as opposed to the rest of the harem) finally conceived, so he decided to move his capital there. After 15 years of construction and beginning to live there, they realized that water was to scarce, so it was abandoned and is now just a tourist attraction. Talk about good planning! It was beautiful and there is a mosque there with his beautiful white marble tomb in it, but we didn't have the time I would have wanted in the mosque as the ground was scorching our feet, our guide was hurrying us along, and there were throngs of people just dying to talk to, stare at, or sell to the white girls. So back to the bus we went. We arrived safely in Agra where we settled into another nice hotel (same hotel family, though not as nice as in Jaipur) and met Hemanshu who had come to switch off with Sunita. Catherine, Amy and I spent a nice couple of hours talking at a coffee shop right next to the hotel -where we got to enjoy an amazing array of old-school American music: a little Eminem, some Pussycat Dolls, Black Eyed Peas covers, and much much more- before the whole group went to Pizza Hut for dinner. It was the night before Grey's birthday so all of the waiters called her to the front of the restaurant so she could stand before them while they did a Bollywood dance for her. It was aweseome :) It was then time to be off to bed since we were going to leave the hotel at 5:30am so we could get to the Taj Mahal early.
So you can imagine the stressful first few minutes of the day when Grey and I were awoken by our weird screeching hotel room doorbell going off at 5:37 because we'd slept through our alarm! Amazingly, we were downstairs ready to go at 5:43 - including me putting on my new saree! The Taj was simply beautiful. Such a unique building, beautiful location and grounds. I was amused, though, that he went to such great lengths as to have a separate not-for-use mosque built on the right so that it would be symmetrical with the mosque on the left, but then the complete perfect symmetry was totally abandoned when he died and his daughter thought he should be with his wife, so his tomb is now next to hers. I discovered in our time at the Taj and then our visit to the Agra Fort, 1) Indians loved seeing an American in a saree, either because they thought it was funny or because they thought it was great and wanted to compliment me or take a picture with or of me, and 2) if I am wearing something out of the ordinary, I don't mind at all that people stare at me; it is when I am being stared at for just being me that I get frustrated.
After our sightseeing, we loaded back up in the giant TOURIST machine and headed on to Vrindavan. Unlike the other places we have been, Vrindavan is visited by pilgrims, not tourists. It is a devotional city because of so many of the acts of Krishna supposedly taking place in and around it. Professor Mason lived in Vrindavan for 7 months with his family when he was working on his dissertation, so he knows and loves it well. We stayed at an ashram that he had stayed in before and taken students to on the other Rhodes summer program he lead a few years ago. We were lucky that they have added AC to some rooms since that time and were kind enough to give those rooms to us (although the electricity and AC were finicky things and some people had a much hotter night than we would have hoped for). One of the things that we had been warned about many times was that Vrindavan is overrun by monkeys, and not the docile langurs, but the aggressive rhesus. None of us suffered any kind of monkey attack, thank goodness, but I did learn that you shouldn't be on the roof (especially alone) when it turns to night because they will start to defend their territory - I had an adrenaline-pounding few minutes of avoiding the monkeys moving towards me in order to get to the door and the sanctuary of bars between us!
Yesterday morning, we got back in the blue beast for the last drive "home." We stopped briefly in Mathura which is just outside of Vrindavan and is the birth place of Krishna (which is now a carnival-esque place with a temple, an animatronics buidling depicting miniature scenes from Krishna's life, a "cave of wonders" with scenes from his life, and much more). Unaware of the extent of the undertaking of seeing the birthplace, some of us didn't bring water or what we needed, so I experienced my first bad time of light-headedness/dehyrdation, etc. Luckily, once we were back in the semi-cool bus and I drank a bottle of water with a gatorade pack in it (bleck!), I gradually felt fine again. A few hours of trying to doze but being blasted awake every 7 minutes or so by the terrible horn of our beast warning that it might run someone over, and lots and lots of construction later, we arrived back in our now-familiar neighborhood of Neeti Bagh.
I wish I could tell all of the stories of the trip, instead of just the cut-and-dried "here's what we did", but I unfortunately don't have the time and, honestly, most of it is still circulating. I continue to see things every day that make me smile or break my heart. India is a roller coaster ride. But I'm growing every day and I thank my gracious Lord for that!
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