New Delhi
Was a foggy, bird filled, busy hub with a lot of people and even more rickshaws. As we went around the town only a few people stared, and only a few children begged incomprehensibly, with your usual quota of stray dogs napping around rubbish piles and their ribs protruding. India has a reputation for being worse off than it is, I certainly didn't feel crowded, though sitting in a car where the traffic involved scarce indicating, frequent near calls and constant honking meant I did actually missed Sydney's traffic, where your biggest concern is finding a radio station that doesn't play Kesha as you wait four hours to get home.
The food was abundant, we had so much for breakfast that we skipped lunch, and had so much in the late afternoon we skipped dinner. There's buffet and then there's indian buffet, where your choices are English Food done like the English themselves ie badly (bacon, Something Meaty A La King, sausages), Hot Indian Food (curries, biryanis, skewers), Mild Indian Food (rotis, naan, dosas, paneer, various fried things like idles), Chinese Food (Things Stir Fried with Garlic), and of course Desserts (cakes, pastries, yoghurts, strange balls covered in coconut, strange balls that are sticky, strange balls that have been deep fried, etc).
Tom wanted to add: The tour guide was a font of unwanted detail. He thoughtfully informed us that India makes things using precious stones and that these stones could be yellow or blue or green or red or... there were probably a few more colours but I'd nodded off by then.
The pool at the hotel was heated to a warm 27 degrees so I was hoping to go for a swim where the night sky could light up the water's warm breath as I listened to the music that was playing under water, and you know, have a wanky ethereal experience or something. I sort of got that, but every thirty second the only other person in the pool, a tall Indian man, would thrash for about 5 metres across the pool. The pool was only 4ft 5 in the 'deep' end so I thought he might have been doing resistance swimming, or trying to make butter. It was about twenty minutes of this, and seriously it was like swimming past a rip every time he was churning the water with his big long legs, before he turns to me bashfully and asks, 'excuse me! how do you keep your head up? I am trying to learn how to swim'. At this point the two staff attendants walked over to watch. The poor guy. I started to show him, and used as many analogies as I could, such as 'like a frog' or 'imagine you are a motor on a boat, not a blanket being slapped onto the water'. It didn't work. Then, perhaps out of desperation, perhaps as a cosmic joke, I tried to get him to float on his back. He would sink as surely as Enron stocks each time and each time he would panic and emit small sounds like a parrot as he flailed his arms, and each time the staff would laugh, eventually not even covering it up with their hands. A good ten minutes elapsed before I bid him farewell. I hope he succeeds in learning how to swim, because it would be embarrassing to drown in water that was chest height.
Agra
So the pool had the last laugh after all.
The Taj Mahal was indeed spectacular, there are no photos than can replicate the details. What made it hard to appreciate the beauty was worrying about if the mosquito bite I had was dengue or malaria, as well as the omnipotent diarrhoea. and let's not pretend we're surprised I got it. If anyone was going to get the shits, it'll be me. I get the shits in Australia on a weekly basis, and that's not including that one time I ate a piece of toast which fell on some rat poison (3 second rule!). However we've only eaten at the hotels, so I'm thinking, it must the pool water. Anyway, thanks to Tom who carried me and sprinted the 200m to the toilets at one stage when I almost blacked out. And if you're the toilet wallah at the Taj, I'm sorry I flung rupees at you and then grabbed the roll of toilet paper, and crapped everywhere. Twice.
The hotels on the plus side, are gorgeous. Water features, marble, acres of gardens, and each one so far have provided very cute congratulatory cakes.
Jaipur
Some pros and cons about travelling on the road, firstly, this tour is fantastic, we get the same driver who takes the two of us everywhere, and we don't need to be on a big coach with randoms with their varying lack of punctuality and invariable consistency of BO. our driver, Ramjeet, or as Tom says, Roger Ramjeet, is pretty astute, and must think I'm a narcoleptic who sleeps all day, or that Tom is some sort of horndog Adonis who never lets me sleep, because all I do in the car is nap. My mouth is usually open too. However there are cons too, like When Roger Ramjeet points to the side of the road at one stage where there were makeshift beds and very young women lying on them, and points out that it only costs about 100 rupees to sleep with one of them, and that really puts your souvenir shopping to shame because I'm sure I bought a fridge magnet that cost that much, it equals about two dollars Aussie. (Speaking of shopping, why do the guides insist on taking us to very obvious tourist traps where they hope we will buy their carpets? Do they imagine we are stone dwelling people with very sensitive feet?) We saw a dog that was run over but unfortunately not dead, in the middle of the highway where no one could safely put it to peace, and we are sometimes hawked at by young, disfigured children, at other times by those who have monkeys stringed at the neck with their pained faces looking so very human as they do tricks.
Now, to try to lighten the tone, I'll tell you about the time I was cackling like a Macbethan witch. The preface is this, all the toilets in the hotels here have a small hose near them, a fancy type hose that I thought might function like a flexible bidet. But after my crisis of dysentery yesterday, I thought, perhaps their function was more simple.
So we are at the lobby of this swanky hotel as our guide checks us in, and I ask Tom,
'do you think the hose next to the toilets is for washing your bum or for cleaning the toilet when you have a particularly nasty poop?'
And he replies,
'I don't think you could use that hose without getting arse juice everywhere'
And I laugh so hard at arse juice that I was unable to stop when the tour guide and a hotel staff walked over. Actually I'm still laughing right now and I should get some sort of certificate for being able to type legibly. I laugh so frequent at the thought of arse juice we now refer to it as AJ in public.
At dinner the hotel buffet was nuclear level spicy. I lost my hearing and went around asking for a lassi, shoving pineapples up my face in a desperate attempt to stop my face from turning into an eggplant. Of course I went back for seconds. The tour groups from Italy and Germany were noticeably upset when they ran out of mashed potatoes.
No comments:
Post a Comment