Udaipur, India (Part 2)

On Wednesday morning we began our adventure in Rajasthan, a state on the western coast of India. Breakfast at the hotel gave me the chance to ponder what the death bowling portion of a cricket match involved, because the local paper was full of talk about Team India’s poor abilities in that particular aspect of the sport.

After breakfast we were greeted by Naveen, our local guide who would try to see to it that we spent lots of money at shops where he would get a nice commission on everything we bought. Oops! My cynicism is showing through. Let me start over. Naveen’s one and only concern was to make sure we saw the best sites in Udaipur, that our every need was attended to, and that nobody in his fair city took any advantage of us whatsoever.

We started at the Jagdish Temple, a Hindu temple dedicated to Lord Jagannath, who is somehow related to Vishnu, who is one of the three major gods in the Hindu religion. I still don’t really have any clue about who is who in Hindu, so you’ll have to take it on faith that this was a pretty impressive temple for reasons that someday will become clear to me.

From the temple we walked to the City Palace, which is the main tourist attraction in Udaipur. And it is a very extraordinary place. It’s a soft-stone complex, rising out of the beautiful Lake Pichola, consisting of 11 different palaces built over 300 years by a variety of potentates. All 11 palaces are connected, making for the largest palace in Rajasthan, and the whole massive edifice is quite imposing.

It was becoming pretty obvious to me that I don’t know anything about Indian history and, unfortunately, I’ve discovered I don’t really want to know much more. My brain is on that downward trajectory that requires you to forget 2-3 things for every new thing you learn, so the trade-off is not really that attractive. I guess what I’m really doing is rationalizing the fact that I don’t remember anything Naveen told us while we were touring City Palace.

I do remember this though, Naveen had Sanju stop the car at an art school in Udaipur, and, in what seemed surprising at the time but after recent repetitions has become well understood, we were the only people visiting the art school at that particular time. Had this been just an educational stop, we might have been pleased with the excellent attention visited on us by the proprietor, a guy whom I’ll call P.T. Barnum to protect his innocence.

P.T. took us through an excruciatingly detailed description of miniature painting that lasted a good 24 seconds or so. After this exhausting introduction, he seemed pretty worn out but he was able to rouse himself just long enough to take us to the sales room where we were assured that we did not have to buy anything even as we were plied with rich, steamy Marsala tea, simply because we were his friends.

The paintings he showed us were fascinating, and not being fully cognizant of the game that was being played on us, we succumbed to the oft-repeated claims of the great deals to be had at the place where these excellent works of art were produced and we proceeded to spend a few hundred dollars on three of the most appealing works he showed us.

Even after being subsequently received at another miraculously empty art factory (this one specializing in marble sculptures where we declined to purchase anything) we felt pretty sanguine about the miniature paintings that we had bought.

That satisfaction came crashing to an end at our next stop, the local botanical garden that also happened to have a small crafts market going on nearby. At one of the craft booths a young man tried to sell me some miniature paintings done at one of the local art schools. I smugly asked how much he wanted, expecting to hear the tens of thousands of Rupees our friend P.T. had told us his paintings would command at any shop in the real world. When the young man started at 600 Rupees (and was probably willing to bargain down) it finally dawned on me that we had been set up. In fairness to us, the paintings we bought are of better quality and they’re done on silk rather than the cotton this man was pushing and ours are larger than the ones he showed me, but still, the bottom line is that we probably paid 2-3 X what we should have for those paintings simply because we were taken in by our guide and P.T.

This was a discomforting thought to me. Not because the few hundred dollars we spent are that important, but rather because it was now clear that not only can you not trust any merchant in India, you also cannot trust a guide whom you are paying good money to supposedly look out for your best interests. When Naveen dropped us at a local Indian restaurant for a lunch that was over-priced and under-spiced, and whose entire clientele had skins as white as ours, we realized that we were simply more fodder in the tourist mill.

The one good thing that came out of our lame lunch was the realization that Peggy was in love with the copper clad, stainless steel bowls that are used to serve many dishes in Rajasthan. She asked Naveen where she could buy some, but he apparently had no commission arrangement with anyone who sold practical things, so he just smiled, turned up his palms and said he couldn’t help.

That sealed the deal for us, so we told Sanju to take us back to the hotel because we were done touring. Almost immediately Peggy spotted a shop that appeared to have exactly the type of bowls she was looking for. Sanju had already overshot it, but this is India and he’s a professional driver, so he just put the car in reverse and backed up against traffic until we got to the shop with the bowls. We bought a goodly supply of three or four different types, and we took pleasure in the notion that Naveen had to just stand there galled because he would not get a piece of this action.

He did force one last stop, at a silver jewelry store, on the way back to the hotel. We protested, he insisted, noting that we didn’t have to buy anything, so we blasted through each section with big smiles on our faces saying “no” to everything that was offered for our examination. When we returned to the car in less than 3 minutes with nothing in our hands, Naveen got the hint. He asked if we needed him to accompany us on a boat trip on the lake later that night, I said “nope”, I tipped him $4 and he got out of the car and went on his way.

We resolved then and there that we would not let a guide manipulate us that way again in the future, a resolution we were soon to learn was very difficult to enforce in the cut-throat world of India tourism.

Sanju took us back to the lake where we enjoyed a boat trip around the perimeter and chatted briefly with a European couple (he British, she Belgian) whom we had seen earlier at the no-spice restaurant.

Back at the hotel, we got into a small argument with Sanju. We were planning to have dinner at Ambrai, a Rough Guide recommendation that appeared to be fairly close to our hotel. When I asked the hotel clerk if we could walk there, he said it wasn’t even much of a walk. But when I told Sanju he could have the night off because we would walk to and from the restaurant, he insisted that he had to drive us. I told him we wanted the exercise and he pulled an Ashraf on me by asking if I was unhappy with him. I tried to explain that we were very happy with him, but he was so insistent on driving us to the restaurant that I finally gave in. He did say that it would be OK with him if we walked back.

Ambrai was very pleasant and very popular. We managed to get a table right on the edge of the lake and had a nice dinner with a passable bottle of Indian red wine and some very traditional live Indian music, this time on sarangi (played with a bow but positioned more like a cello than a violin) and tablas. Just as we were contemplating desert, a woman approached us from behind. It was Ruth, the Belgian lady we had met earlier in the day. She and her husband, Graham, were having dinner at the table just behind ours. We agreed to have a cup of tea together when they were done with dinner. And in preparation for that, we asked a young man sitting at the table next to us if we could borrow a chair from his table, and, noticing that he appeared to be eating alone, we asked if he wanted to join us as well.

So we spent a very agreeable hour chatting with a Brit, a Belgian, and Sylvian, the young man from Switzerland. Sylvian was truly traveling alone because he couldn’t talk any of his friends into coming along. He was young and certainly braver than I could have been at any age, but he seemed to be taking whatever India threw at him well in stride.

The chat was pleasant, but the bites I was enduring on my ankles were finally more than I could bear so we walked the three minutes back to our hotel (everyone wondering why Sanju had been so insistent on driving us to the restaurant). Before tumbling into bed, I counted the bites on my ankles and came up with 20+ on each. I assume they were sand fleas or something like that, but it proved again that I am the most delectable morsel on earth when it comes to biting insects. Peggy’s feet, clad in sandals without socks, were no more than 2 or 3 feet from mine during the entire evening, and though I was feasted on some 40 or more times, she received nary a nibble.

Find a manageable number of pictures here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/26545681@N07/collections/72157622606510539/