Day Nine: April 13 - Bus to Agra
The day begins with a wheat porridge that Diana and I can’t get enough of. It’s a bit like eating delicious raw, hard pellets of wheat.
We take our journey’s only bus to Agra, home of the Taj Mahal. The trip takes about 11 hours, and is during the heat of the day. There’s no AC, and the fans mounted above every seat aren’t turned on. The windows let in a cool breeze in the morning, but by the afternoon, the air is hot and stagnant.
We only stop once for food, at a giant bus parking lot where I promptly lose our bus. The only food for sale is fried and packaged. I buy one delicious orange, a package of cookies and another of crackers.
We see our first camel on the way, towing a cart along the highway. A man is perched atop the cart.
A driver from our guesthouse is set to pick us up at 6 p.m. at the bus station, but the bus doesn’t get to town 'til 7:30, and we’re not sure where the bus station is. Finally we get off the bus at a food stand and call the guesthouse. They tell us they’ll pay for an auto rickshaw.
Diana and Edi (a fellow traveler, Japanese) are in the back, and the driver tells me to sit in front next to him. Trouble is, my legs won’t fit. So half my body is hanging out of the cab, getting soaked in the rain.
The other half is in the driver’s way. He elbows me in the chest with every shift of the gears.
We arrive in a dark, dirty alley. Our guesthouse is at the end, totally dark. Power’s out. It comes back a few minutes later, and we see a tiny room and bathroom with a shower, but no hot water. No sink either.
The place is shabbier, but more expensive, than our last place. Diana tells me to ask for a 50-rupee discount. A mistake.
The Indian man behind the desk throws a fit. “What? We wait for you at the station for an hour and get you a rickshaw and now you ask cheaper? You pay the man!” He points to our rickshaw driver. “And you go to another guesthouse!”
OK, we’ll do without the discount.
Day 10: April 14 - The Taj, and train to Jaipur
…The Taj ..! The site Diana has been waiting the whole trip to see. I’m more excited about the desert, but of course I too want to see one of the world’s most famous tombs, what “Lonely Planet calls “the most beautiful building in the world.”
There’s no doubt that the pearly, etched stone is stunning. Kudos to the cleaners! (We visitors ease the cleaning by covering our shoes and flip flops with surgical booties.)
Inside is beautiful, too, resplendent with more carvings, jewels and paintings. But there’s not much to see other than a false tomb.
Construction of the Taj took more than 20 years. It was built by Emperor Shah Jahan to commemorate the life of his third wife, who died during the birth of their 14th child.
Diana and I are in Agra only for the Taj, so we take off on a train that evening for the desert – Jaipur. The trip is only five short hours, just long enough to settle into a bunk and catch some sleep.
I am awakened by Diana yelling at me to get off the train. There aren’t any announcements, and no indication of where we are other than the occasional station sign or reports from other passengers.
I scramble to get my bag packed, but I’m not fast enough. The train starts moving before I reach the door. Diana’s outside. I can hear her yelling, “Emily, hurry!”
I stand at the door, ready to jump. We’re not moving that fast yet, and I should be fine if I just drop and roll, right? I’m ready to go for it, when a group of older Indian men urge me back.
“But my friend got off the train!” I yell. “I have to jump!”
The next station is only one or two kilometers farther. I should just wait, they say. What seems like 15 minutes passes and I’m off the train, but near hysterics. Should I wait for Diana? Will she come to the next station to find me? I have no idea. I wait for almost half an hour before the auto rickshaw guys convince me to give up for the night. It’s already after 10, and it will be hard to get a room, they say.
Diana and I had picked out a guesthouse for the night, and I am convinced it’s listed in “Lonely Planet” as a place that offers free pickup. Trouble is, I don’t remember the guesthouse name, and Diana has our “Lonely Planet.” If I can just get a copy of a “Lonely Planet”…
The auto rickshaw driver takes me to a couple guesthouses, but none have the guide. Finally I surrender and book a room at a nearby joint. A huge, clean and decorative room with hot water and TV, it’s the nicest place I stay at in India.
Day 11: April 15 - Jaipur
Despite the relaxing atmosphere, I am still freaked about finding Diana, and barely sleep. We have tickets for a train leaving at midnight, but what if I can’t find her? I wake at 6 and go out on the street, ready to resume my search for a “Lonely Planet.”
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| Zakir, the taxi driver, is on the right. His young friend is on the left. You can figure out who's in the middle. |
But this isn’t Cambodia. People don’t wake at 4:30 with the wat chantings and rooster crowingsZakir, an energetic man with a big black taxi.
Zakir’s friend has an Internet shop stocked with “Lonely Planets.” But of course it’s not open yet. A couple chais later, the shop is open, but all the LPs are with tourists. I e-mail Diana and then resume the LP search. Zakir and I go to several places, but always get the same story. They had the guide, but now tourists have it. “Oh Shit! Shit!” Zakir says after each failure.
Finally we achieve success. A French woman has a LP — in French. She translates, finding two places that say they provide free pickup. I call both places, and the man at one of the places says Diana is there!
We’re off! The man at reception calls a flurry of rooms, asking each of the groggy guests (it’s still before 8 a.m.) one question: “What country are you from?” None of them are from the States. The person named Diana is a man from England.
But I still don’t give up. I ask at a pair of guesthouses across the street, and call a couple other guesthouses. Then I give up. We go eat at a cheapie joint where I eat the Indian cure-all for a poopy stomach: curd (yogurt), daal and rice. And it works!
After eating, I check my e-mail for the billionth time. There’s word from Diana! We’ll meet at 5:30 for dinner.
I can finally relax and see some sights. I go off on an all-day tour with Zakir. He tells me he’s 27, but he looks at least 40. Before entrusting my day to him, I ask to see his taxi license. He acts shocked, then gives me the license as collateral.
We drive through downtown, made up of crumbly buildings in faded salmon, and up, up, up to the royal family tombs. The decorative domes topping the empty tombs are bordered by a stone wall that climbs the hills like China’s Great Wall.
We pull up to the tombs with Hindi music blasting from the open windows. I feel like a wanna-be gangster in high school.
A couple grubby kids glob onto me as I get out of the car. “Chocolate,” they say, motioning to their mouths. Apparently I can buy it at a stand across the parking lot. Nah.
The water palace is next. On the way back into the city we pass an elephant climbing the hill, a boy perched high on the elephant’s back. Zakir keeps the music cranked, playing the same dance-party Hindi tune over and over.
“God gives us a second life, so why can’t we have fun and excitement?” he asks, swinging his arms to the beat.
The Water Palace is just what it sounds like: a palace on the water, used as a pleasure place by kings in the mid-18th century. A couple Indian guys ask to take their picture with me.
“I like foreigners,” one of the guys explains.
Zakir next drops me at Nahargarh, the Tiger Fort, a massive sandstone fortress rising out of the hillside. Zakir leaves me to explore for two hours while he visits his mosque. It’s Friday, Islam’s holy day.
A winding staircase leads to a courtyard; another set of stairs to the empty palace. I’m not sure I want to pay 200 rupees ($4.50) to enter the palace. I ask an exiting tourist if the ticket is worth the price, and get answered by an accompanying guide, who tries to get me to pay an additional 200 rupees for his services.
I buy a ticket and flee up the stairs in an effort to get rid of the pestering guide. I’m glad I do. The cavernous palace is nothing but hollowed-out stone, but it’s interesting to imagine the place as it once was.
Royalty once lived here. Now all that remains in the maze of rooms is the latrines, which contain a few cisterns and slots in the floor that served as toilets. But it’s fun roaming the labyrinthine corridors, which poke out to terraces with glorious views of the city below.
Most of the palace’s visitors are Indian. A couple young guys corner me in a room and take a picture of me. “Maa’am, you look awesome!” one of the guys exclaims. I leave before they can take another picture of me.
A movie is being shot in the palace’s courtyard. A white sheet billows above video cameras and guys in black samurai robes with red sashes.
Back in the taxi, Zakir pulls on his white knit prayer cap and turns on the tunes. We soon stop at a pirated CD stand. I buy a Hindi dance mix (100 songs for about fifty cents), and Zakir buys a couple discs —one, called “Hollywood,” has a collage of girls with big boobs on the front. The songs include American classics like “Barbie girl,” “Who let the dogs out?” and “We will rock you.” Zakir’s CDs are often stolen from his car, and he’s bought this CD several times.
He immediately puts on track 8, and begins dancing and singing along. “Where do you go to, my lovely? I want to know…”
I tell Zakir I can’t afford his proposed daily fare of 500 rupees ($11), and he suggests I visit a couple tourist traps so he can earn commission. The first trap is a craft mall. Zakir gives me his cell phone and tells me to look around until he calls. His call will mean he has received his 30 rupees (75 cents) and I can leave.
I wander in and out of every store, looking at kashmir, pashima, paintings, even furniture. A mall employee tails me, and tries to discourage me from entering the furniture store. I think he can tell I’m not interested in buying anything, especially furniture.
My next duty is watching laborers at a fabric store. I watch one guy stamp pink patterns on a large sheet and another guy weave a rug. I then enter the two-storied store and wander amid the expensive fabrics until I can leave. A seller wants to show me saris and sheets, but I tell him not to bother.
We drink chai in the parking lot, and then I visit a guru. Zakir’s been talking this guy up so much I think he must also make a commission off taking me there. The guru has changed lives, Zakir says. He can help anyone. Lots of tourists are mad about him. And his services are free; he doesn’t expect anything in return for a peek into your soul. What the hell, I decide. I’ll visit the guy.
He works in a jewelry shop. We enter a room with a couple guys lounging in front of the usual jewelry shop cases. Zakir talks to them a bit, then takes me to a back room, opens the door and leaves me in there.
This room is also lined with jewelry cases. At the back of the room, behind a case of stones, sits a normal looking guy in normal looking clothes. He looks more like a salesman than a guru. I stand in front of him until he tells me to sit down.
“You look like you don’t know why you’re here,” he says.
“I don’t,” I answer.
“Why do you think you’re here?”
“I heard there was a guru here…”
“I’m a guru,” he says. “I can help you. You can ask me any question. I can answer anything. So what do you want to know?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “I don’t know what to ask you.”
He starts telling me things about myself. Things he says he gets just from sitting across from me.
He starts out nice, then gets weird.
I have incredible energy, he says. I should help people. After my time in Cambodia I should go back to the States to figure out what I want to do.
My mother’s 56 — or will be this year. She’s been pregnant three times. I thought it had only been twice, but maybe there’s some things I don’t know, he says. (“He’s making stuff up,” my mom says.)
She also has a lump in her breast, he says. (Not true, she says.)
He tells me I had a relationship two-and-a-half years ago. I suppose that’s true, I say, but it wasn’t long.
No, he says, I have problems with long relationships because I have trust issues.
I tell him that I’m a unitasker — that I can only focus on one thing at a time, and he says that’s fine, that’s good for me, because my mind never stops.
I’m very nervous, he says, but I hide behind a façade of calm. I doubt myself a lot, and I don’t know how to breathe. My throat chakra is broken. I need to learn how to breathe. He can help me.
He places a tiny chip of dark blue stone in my left palm and tells me to cross my hands, left palm on top of right. Close my eyes, he says, and breathe.
After a few minutes he tells me to open my eyes. Is my breath faster or slower? I can't feel my pulse. It’s faster, he tells me.
I don’t know what that means, but he tells me he can help me. He can make me a pendant of this special stone that will help me repair my throat chakra and be able to better breathe and communicate.
It will take only an hour and cost only 6,000 rupees ($136). Yikes. No thanks, I say.
“No, I knew you would say that when you came in,” he says.
I ask him about the stone and he’s slow to reveal its name, saying I can’t buy it anywhere. But it’s called tangenite, he says. It’s the stone featured in “Titanic.”
After the guru and a lemon soda on the rooftop, we finally meet Diana. She laughs at my efforts to find her. We would have eventually met at the station for our midnight train, she says.
A younger Indian dude has joined us, and I’m glad for his presence. Zakir freaks me out with his touchy-feely nature. He seems to constantly be on the verge of kissing me.
The four of us eat dinner at Diana’s guesthouse and then Zakir and I go to a Rajasthani music show he talks up so much I wonder if my attendance means another commission.
It’s a puppet show that begins with a couple guys playing drums and singing. They tell me to sit in a plastic chair in front. I know this means I’ll be obligated to pay them, but I can’t politely refuse.
The performance is a puppet variety show. Several puppets perform: a traditional dancer, a snake charmer, a horse rider and an Indian Michael Jackson who can detach and reattach his head.
After the show, one of the guys gives me a speech about how he’s a starving artist and can I buy some of his wares. His art includes puppets and those strands of elephants you can buy at Pier 1. Sorry, I say, his art is very beautiful, but I don’t want to buy any of it. Then he asks for a donation. I give him 20 rupees (less than 50 cents — wow, I’m cheap)!
Next I pay Zakir the agreed-upon 400 rupees ($9). He immediately gets sulky, not because of the fare, but because I’m leaving that night for Jaisalmer. Why am I going there? I should stay in Jaipur, he says. He makes me promise to come back and visit his village. I should tell other tourists about his taxi service, he says. And I should call him when I arrive in Jaisalmer.
Day 12: April 16 - Jaisalmer
The overnight train to Jaisalmer is about 11 hours. For much of the trip, Diana and I are joined by a self-professed guru with a walrus moustache who isn’t assigned to our bunk section, but who can’t stay away from us.
He initiates our friendship by asking our help in editing a brochure for him on his yoga and meditation center. I love editing, so it’s no problem. But the guy barely acknowledges our edits. Instead, he launches into how he can do a reading for me.
Under the pretense of editing, he shows me a notebook filled with testimonies from past customers.
The guy’s nice – he buys me a couple chais, gives me a packet of biscuits and offers to give me a painting of my choice from the stack in his black duffel bag. But I am exhausted from listening to endless lectures from endless Indian men.
I try to signal disinterest in his dronings by pulling out a book — “The Da Vinci Code” — which I am finally unsnobby enough to read. But he doesn’t take the hint. Instead, he acts surprised that I am reading a book in English.
“A lot of people in America speak Spanish,” he says.
He then tells me that I shouldn’t eat pickles and that I’ll look the same when I’m 60 as I do now.
“I get such a nice feeling talking to you,” he says again and again.
A driver from our guesthouse picks us up at the train station, which turns out to be a good way to avoid the pack of wolves that are the auto rickshaw drivers. I push an elderly Indian couple out of the way in my desperate escape from the wolves.
We stay inside Jaisalmer Fort, India’s only inhabited fort. Within the 12th-century fort is a maze of streets lined with guesthouses and shops with outside displays of books, notebooks, shoes and clothes.
At the hotel, we sign up for a two-day camel safari. As Fatan, the guy behind the desk says, “No knowledge without camel college.”
He knows other rhymes, too, like “No wife, no life,” and “Beautiful wife, dangerous for life.”
I borrow a cell phone to call Zakir that night, as promised. I spent all of yesterday with the guy, and he acted like he was going to cry when he left, but now he doesn’t even remember who I am!
“Sorry, I get a lot of tourists,” he says. “I’m with three girls from England right now.”
A few minutes later he calls me back, employing a much friendlier tone.
“Hi honey,” he says. “How are you? I miss you so much.”
Day 13: April 17 - Camel safari in Jaisalmer: Day one
Day one of our two-day camel safari. Diana and I go with two Irish lads, William and Eoin (pronounced Owen).
Each of us has our own camel. Oh, but wait! They’re not actually camels! They’re dromedaries. Camels have two humps, and these creatures have only one. Camels also have longer hair and shorter legs than dromedaries. India (and most other countries) don’t have any camels, Fatan tells us. But most people still call dromedaries camels. So we’ll go with that. Sorry, dromedaries!
My camel’s name is Bapoo. At 12, he is the group elder. You can see his wiseness in his dark, long-lashed eyes. He is also the only camel on the trip that doesn’t chew cud. (Like a cow, most of the other camels are constantly chewing their food, regurgitating it, and chewing it some more.)
Two guides lead our safari: Matar, a lively chatterbox who has been leading safaris since age 12 and knows English well, and his trainee Gordon, a quiet but goofy guy who Diana says looks like a character from “The Simpsons.” Gordon has been training with Matar for three years, but knows only a little English.
Diana and I are a bit nervous about how to get on the camels, but they make it easy for us. Matar and Gordon simply pull the reigns and make a soothing “chi, chi, chi” noise. This signals the one-humped giants to kneel on their forelegs. A jerk later, and they’ve also folded under their hind legs, and are sitting on the ground.
Each camel is covered in a blanket and a saddle. Bapoo, the biggest camel, is loaded with food and cooking equipment and bedrolls — and me. I grab hold of the saddle and pull myself on.
Gordon clicks his tongue and Bapoo rises — first his forelegs, then herk, jerk, his hinds. “Lean back,” Matar tells me.
Once I’m on, the riding is a comfortable side-to-side swaying. Still, the mere act of straddling Bapoo is a major inner-thigh stretch, and the stretch soon becomes painful.
We travel in a camel train, with each of us holding the lead of the camel directly behind. Matar and Gordon walk alongside. As we walk, Gordon sings Hindi songs and busts rhymes.
“How can we do? Kathmandu,” he says when something is hopeless.
“One, two, three, India free!” when taking pictures.
“No power, no shower,” when, well, I never figured this one out.
I had imagined the desert to be all dunes and swirling sand. It’s not. Most of the area we cover is rocky scrub land inhabited by scraggly trees and goats. It’s hot, but not as hot as I imagined. Still, I am not taking any chances with the sun. Only the strip of calf between my ankles and pants cuffs is exposed to the sun. I wear a long-sleeved shirt, long pants, socks on my hands and feet, and a hat that covers my whole face except my eyes.
Because our camels aren’t really camels, they don’t spit. But they do fart. And poop. A lot. We are engulfed in a continuous farty odor. Must be from all that hay. That’s all the camels eat on the trek, aside from the few leaves they snatch from trees we pass.
After an hour or two of walking, we stop for lunch beneath a large tree.
Getting off the camels is tougher than getting on. I lean back as Bapoo kneels and then sits, but I can’t get my leg over his girth without help. Gordon and Matar stand on opposite sides of me. They both grab my right leg, one pulling and the other pushing it over the knob of the saddle. I ease myself to the ground and straighten. I’ve been riding for less than two hours, but I’m already walking like John Wayne.
Lunch begins with chai and yellow tubes the texture of styrofoam. A soupy veggie mix is next, with yellow ramen noodles and chapatti.
Gordon makes the chapatti and Matar cooks everything else. The two guides insist on waiting for us to finish eating before they begin. Dishes are cleaned with sand and hands. No soap or water.
The camels wander off to scavenge up their own lunch of leaves, but not before having their front legs tied together with a short length of rope. The guides later feed them bags of hay.
Naps and card games while away the after-lunch hours, the day’s hottest.
After lunch we visit a couple villages populated by lots of children living in squat mud huts, some topped by rounded grassy roofs, others simply squared off. The children at both villages ask for rupees and pens. At the first village the children offer us bags of chips to buy and at the second they show us their collection of foreign money, including a $2 coin from New Zealand. The second village is where Matar is from. We drink chai outside his family’s hut.
We reach our sleeping place amid the sand dunes just in time for sunset. Made up of sand that is hard yet crumbles under bare feet, the dunes rise from a field of broken-up rocks.
We climb the short dunes to a flat plate of earth. From here we can simultaneously see the sun setting and the moon rising. To the west, the sun is a neon white disc sinking in a cherry tomato sky. To the east, the moon is a marbled white circle as perfectly round as the sun, climbing a sky of a darkening bruise.
Below the sun stands a trio of windmills, each with three stagnant speared blades. These windmills stand at attention throughout the desert, generating electricity for people who live in the town, but not for the poor village residents we visit. They live without power.
Dinner is tastier than lunch, and even has an accompanying song.
“Daal and chapatti, onion and potato, camel-a safari, camel-a safari,” Matar sings as he cooks over the open fire. There’s also rice.
We sleep on the desert sand, on blankets under thick, Japan-made comforters. I’m wearing most of my clothes, including socks on my hands and feet, but I still wake up cold in the middle of the night.
Day 14: April 18 - Camel safari in Jaisalmer: Day two
Breakfast is toast with jam, biscuits (called cookies in America), papaya, cantaloupe, and chai, of course.
William and Eoin signed up for two nights in the desert, so Diana and I decide to spend another night instead of heading back today like we had planned.
The day passes much the same as yesterday. I have to ask to get off Bapoo during a three-hour stretch of morning riding cause my inner thighs hurt so bad. Bapoo lowers himself and I switch to side saddle.
The new position is a reprieve for the legs, but makes for a bumpier, scarier ride. I am now rocking side to side, holding onto the saddle with my left hand and the bedroll with my right. I’m afraid I’ll topple to the ground if I let go.
But it’s only half an hour before we reach the big tree for lunch. The food is similar to yesterday’s noon meal: a veggie mix of eggplant and potato, yellow noodles and chapati, with an appetizer of chai, those yellow styrofoam tubes and semolina flour.
Gordon throws a rope weighted with a rock on each end into a tree to bring a cluster of branches down to Bapoo. Bapoo munches on the leaves while the other camels eat hay from bags.
We camp in a bowl amid dunes even bigger than last night. William and Eoin shoot crazy poses in the fading light while I log roll very slowly down the hill. Rolling down grassy hills as a kid was a lot more exciting. But less exfoliating. When I come to a stop at the bottom of the hill, sand has ground into every pore of my body.
There’s more sand troubles around the campfire. Because of the strong wind, Matar is having trouble keeping the fire lit for chai. But he’s not worried. He is confident the wind will soon die down. I don’t believe him, but a half hour or so later, he turns out to be right.
Dinner is the usual, sing along with me, now: “Daal and chapati, onion and potato, camel-a safari, camel-a safari.”
Gordon eats a packet of something (paan?) that makes him kookier than ever. He is full of laughter and singing. Matar accompanies him on guitar. I try to stay awake to enjoy the tuneless troubadouring, but today’s rough riding has taken it out of me. I go to sleep first, under a warmer blanket than last night.
This blanket — along with two T-shirts, a long-sleeved shirt, long pants, two bandanas, a hat and socks on my hands and feet — keeps me warm the whole night long.
Day 15: April 19 - Camel safari in Jaisalmer: Day three
I wake up last, to calls for chai. Today is the last day so breakfast is a special treat — porridge! And not just any old oat porridge, but the wheat stuff that Diana and I are crazy about. I eat mine and half of Diana’s, plus biscuits and toast and cantaloupe.
I am so done with camel riding. After an hour or so of groin pain, I ask to dismount Bapoo and walk. Matar rides Bapoo for a while, sitting side saddle and singing. Then he dismounts and Bapoo gets a break from human cargo.
Today’s journey is shorter. We stop once at a circular trough for camel drinks and then under a tree just before lunch time. But there is no lunch today. The tree is simply our pickup spot. We take group photos and then play cards for an hour or more before the jeep arrives.
The driver speeds back to the guesthouse and drops us at 1:30. Our camel adventure is over.
Day 16: April 20 - Jaisalmer and train to New Delhi
After a breakfast of muesli, yogurt, fruit and chai I walk to the Jain temples. On my way, I see a dog lunge at an old woman. The dog is snarling and barking like he wants to kill the woman, but the woman has a stick. The woman passes me and the dog ceases its attack. Still, I am afraid to walk by the dog.
“It’s OK,” says a woman outside the shop where the dog is. “He doesn’t like that woman. She’s a gypsy. She steals people’s bags.” She gestures to my bag, as if to take it.
The dog retreats under a bench and I approach. The woman brings me chai and I talk to her and a nearby man. The chai is the best I’ve had in India. Spicy, not the bland, sweet stuff I’ve received for the past 16 days.
The woman tries to get me to buy stuff from her shop, of course, but I say no thanks. Instead, I take a stack of her business cards with the promise to give them to other tourists. (That doesn’t happen.)
I visit a couple Jain temples, admiring their intricate brown carved stone. Locked behind countless carved wooden doors with barred windows are Buddha-like figures, bald, heavy-browed men sitting in lotus positions. Jainism and Buddhism share similar beliefs, but the statues are not of Buddha. They are of Mahavir, or Vardhamana, the Indian guy who established the framework for Jainism around 500 BCE.
Downstairs, three women are praying to a shrine of a large figure of Mahavir as a bell hanging in the entrance rings over tinny spiritual music.
An Indian man is quickly walking around to each figure, clasping his hands in prayer and then moving onto the next figure.
Only two of the seven temples are open. The rest are closed to tourists until 11. I kill time in a couple havelis, which are really nice tall, sandstone houses that belonged to the city’s wealthy merchants. In the first one I just use the bathroom, but a guy working there still invites me to chai later. In the second one, a young guy shows me a posh room before taking me up to the rooftop, where he talks and talks while I zone out.
He talks about women from the villages who are stuck home while men work. It is not until this city that I have seen women working. Here they work in shops.
The face of his guru hangs on a pendant tied around his neck with a piece of string.
“Are you tired?” he asks, then starts massaging the skin between my thumb and pointer finger. Four seconds for my right hand, nine for my left, then opposite for my feet. When he moves onto my shoulders, I say “enough.”
The point of all this? Energy. “After this you’re ready to get up and go!”
The massaging can also help relieve aches and pains. He tells of an English girl whose pain was finally relieved by him after she had paid several thousand rupees to other practitioners.
I escape without further massage, but not without another chai invitation.
Lunch, I later discover is at a “Lonely Planet” pick. It’s a thali place, which here means six types of foods, each in its own section on a tin plate. There’s a green, rooty vegetable that’s native to Rajasthan, curry vegetables, daal, yogurt, crispy fried wonton noodles, parathas and a yellow, milky sweet. My drink is another dessert: a very sweet lassi studded with candied fruit. The yogurt is so thick I have to eat it with a spoon.
Diana and Fatan, the guesthouse host, unexpectedly join me at the restaurant. They eat and then Fatan takes us on his motorcycle to Gadsisar Lake, which is actually a water tank built around 1400 AD. A couple temples and shrines are anchored in the water.
Ahead of us is an 18-hour train ride back to Delhi. In preparation, I buy a sandwich, 10 oranges and some biscuits. I also sprint up the street for a popsicle of homemade ice cream indigenous to the region.
It’s not the mythical camel ice cream I’ve been pining for, but it’s still good, and has an odd taste, like it’s natural.
Our train leaves at 4:30 p.m. and is scheduled to arrive in Delhi at 10:30 a.m. A four-hour delay means it doesn’t actually arrive in Delhi until 3 p.m.
A man with a moustache, striped shirt and workout pants joins us for part of the journey. He gives the same speech several times.
“I’m an army man in Jaisalmer. I no English,” he begins.
Then he moves onto the weather. “Summer is very hot in Jaisalmer. Winter is very cold in Jaisalmer.”
And finally, the festival. “February is the biggest festival in Jaisalmer. Fifty thousand airplanes in the sky.”
Thankfully, the guy finally moves away from our section.
Sitting across from me throughout the ride is a young, quiet, bespectacled Indian guy who is militant about closing and opening the windows as we pass dusty fields. Despite his tactics, I have to borrow one of Diana’s socks to wipe the layer of dust off my seat.
Day 17: April 21 - Train to New Delhi and plane to Bangkok
Breakfast is on a train platform and is far more delicious than the veggie cutlet that tore apart my bowels on our first train. Potato curry and six small chapatis for less than 50 cents.
Back on the train, a woman approaches me with a shrine. A pile of coins topped with a 50-rupee note lays below the small altar, and incense smoke is curling around her face. The woman holds the shrine in front of her face and points to the money. I don’t give her any.
She is just one of the many beggars on the trains. Also prevalent are women with children and people who push rags in front of them as they crawl through the aisles.
After finally arriving in Delhi, we check in at the guesthouse we stayed at two weeks ago and then hit up a food hole with the Irish laddies. Chickpeas and chapatis and a sweet lassi for me.
I later try to casually stroll the street looking for shirts, but there is no casual shopping here. Harassment is heavy. I constantly get called at to come look at shops.
“What country?” a man asks me. “German? Switzerland?” I laugh and shake my head, scowling.
“Angry!” he says.
For our last meal in Delhi we visit Mt. Everest restaurant, a place I’d been eyeing since we arrived. The eatery is at the top of a flight of stairs so steep it’s like climbing the real Everest. I want a beer to soothe my stomach but am too cheap to pay 150 rupees for it. The only beer available in India seems to be giant, expensive bottles of Kingfisher. So I order lemon, honey, ginger tea instead, but it’s not until we leave that I realize I forgot to put the tea bag in! No wonder the drink was so lemony.
Our flight to Bangkok leaves at nearly midnight and arrives about four hours later. The ride is tarnished only by the sour man sitting on the aisle. I’m by the window, so I have to pass him the two times I go to the bathroom.
My first trip is before he sits down. I come back and he jerks his legs back a centimeter and mutters something I can’t hear which Diana translates as, “You should have thought about that before.”
A few hours later I have to pee again. When I tap the man he raises his shoulders in a “What the hell?” gesture and shifts his legs slightly. “Sorry,” I say. When I tap his shoulder on the way back in he lasers me a death stare and doesn’t make any attempt to let me by. I first try inching by with my front facing him and then realize this guy doesn’t deserve that courtesy. I stick my butt in his face and plow through him.
Day 18: April 22 - Bangkok
Our plane arrives in Bangkok at about 6 a.m. We catch a bus to the tourist district, find a guesthouse and sleep for seven hours.
Breakfast is poached eggs and toast while watching boys in swim trunks and girls in cover-ups slurp from beer towers. They look like they never went to bed.
These tourists are packed into the bars and restaurants lining the streets, buying fruit and crepes from the street carts and the same T-shirts and knick-knacks that are for sale throughout southeast Asia.
That night I go to my first real movie theater in nearly two years. The movie? A dudsy sci-fi: “Source Code.”
Day 19: April 23 - Still Bangkok
The morning begins with my first facial. The sensations are like nothing I’ve felt before. I close my eyes and imagine dolphins swimming on my face. Next it feels like the woman is kneading dough and playing piano on my face, and then pawing my shoulders like a dog for the shoulder massage.
After the upper body it’s time for the lower.
“Spread your legs,” the woman commands.
What? Am I in a brothel? I didn’t think I signed up for a happy ending massage, but I comply.
My face is swaddled in cotton and I can’t see the woman, but I feel her straddle my legs and begin massaging my calves, then up higher.
A lamp is shooting heat on my face and it’s difficult to breathe, especially through the cotton. Nearby I can hear an Aussie woman roaring with laughter about the fish chewing her feet as part of the fish foot massage.
A cucumber coating and mask and then it’s over. But wait, do I want waxing? My eyelashes tinted black? No.
The colossal but boring MBK mall is that night. Dinner is soup with five kinds of mushrooms at a Japanese fast food joint.
After dinner is another movie. “Rio," a cartoon 3-D flick that’s way better than last night’s real-people show.
A propaganda video of the Thai king plays before both movies. Within the first notes of the movie’s introductory music the audience is on its feet. The video shows the king among his people, helping with clean-ups and participating in experiments, helping advance his country.
King Bhumibol Adulyadej, “an inspiration for all Thais,” the movie says.
Day 20: April 24 - Back to Cambodia
Our van back to Cambodia leaves early in the morning. Several Thai ladies of the night are strolling the streets buying fruit at the street stands, yelling to their men that they will be right with them.
The van to Bangkok 20 days ago had about six passengers, but the van back from Bangkok is packed with 20-some people. Welcome back to Cambodia!
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