I met the highest Lama, his accent sounded fine to me, to me...”
-Vampire Weekend
Photos: http://princeton.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2050525&l=5406b&id=1101094
Temperature: 95
Morale: 9
Spinning: Vampire Weekend - EP, Vampire Weekend – Vampire Weekend
Reading: Lonely Planet
Talking: To the few tourists in Bundi, including two French girls and a British family.
What's next (I think): More Bundi, then
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First, a few words about the band from which I took today’s quotation: Vampire Weekend.
I'm not sure what to think about this band (although I know what I think about the name). On the surface, I like the music. But I don't like that most of their songs involve Cape Cod or other parts of
And one more thing—but this is beef with the critic, not the band. The critic writes that Dharamsala is “a town in northern
All that said, I do like the music. It’s catchy, it’s brainy (though it has its weak spots), and, most importantly, it’s different than much of the other new music out there right now. There guys could go far.
Also, they're playing at
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I had a great sleep in my Bundi haveli, and I woke up around 8am feeling the best I had since northern
It wasn't until the next morning that I learned what was going on behind the scenes of that conversation. It seems that the couple had eaten breakfast at the haveli the previous morning, and had split the all-you-can-eat breakfast, which you're really not supposed to do, but the haveli owner had let it slide. But then they ordered tea, which cost something like Rs 40 extra, and according to the haveli owner he had served it to them with his own hand. But when they got the bill, they said they didn't have tea and wouldn't pay the extra Rs 40. He told them they most certainly did have tea, but they maintained that they didn't and never paid for it. Hence the bad feeling between the two parties. Who lies about a $1 tea? Very strange. Anyhow, now I wish I hadn't let them put their bags in my room.
I had breakfast at the same lakeside terrace restaurant that I had eaten dinner at the night before. I had French toast, which was not exactly the French toast I was used to (crunchy toast, no syrup, with butter, cinnamon, sugar, and coconut on top), but in the end it was quite tasty. Then I walked down to the main cluster of shops in town to see about renting a motorbike for the day.
Motorbike rental was a consistent Rs 150 per day across all the shops, plus Rs 50 per liter of petrol. But the bikes got about 45km/liter, so you could easily buzz around the town and the surrounding area all day on two liters of petrol. Anyhow, for a grand total of $6, I was more than willing to step up and rent a bike. I found a brand new Yamaha (which had all of 79 miles on the odometer) for the same price as all the others, so I took it.
The guy was more than willing to rent the thing to me without so much as a security deposit. I didn't even have to pay the Rs 150 until I brought it back at the end of the day. What if I had decided to drive the thing to Mumbai and never come back? Trusting people, these Bundi residents.
Oh yeah, and he also didn't seem to mind that I clearly had no idea what I was doing (I had actually never driven a motorbike before, and so I had to ask silly questions such as how to start the bike and how to give it gas). I guess he assumed that I would figure out quickly enough how to handle it, which I did. It’s not so different than riding a bicycle, in the end.
I rode the bike around town a few times to get the hang of it, and then I took it out on the major road out of town, which luckily had just been repaved. I took it up to full speed, which was a touch under 70 km/h, which is not all that fast, but still fast enough for it to be a blast. And, more importantly, at 70km/h I stopped sweating.
I rode past a mosque (I guess there are a few Muslims in Bundi), and in front of the mosque was a small fountain that had about 50 naked and half-naked kids playing in it. It was quite the spectacle. I took as many pictures as possible.
Then I rode out of Bundi toward Rameshwar, a village about 20km from Bundi which supposedly had a cool cave temple and a waterfall. But on the way I passed a bunch of kids playing what looked to be baseball, so I slowed down to have a look. The kids immediately started yelling for me to come over and play with them, and of course I wasn't going to turn down that offer—I've been missing sports since college.
I'm not sure which team was up or whose turn it was to bat, but apparently it didn't matter, because when I got there it immediately became my turn. That was just fine with me. They were playing with a softball and pitching underhand, so I immediately smacked the second pitch over everyone's head for a “home run” (no fence). The kids loved it.
After a few more people batted we switched sides (there wasn't so much of a “three outs per inning” rule in this game—it was more just whenever one team got sick of fielding, they whined until they got to bat), and they made me pitch. But they wanted me to pitch overhand for some reason, which again was just fine with me. I struck out everyone on their team except for one person, who popped up to second. There’s nothing like playing baseball with a bunch of 15 year olds to boost your ego.
The kids asked me questions about the rules the whole time I was there, which wasn't surprising given that baseball takes a back seat to cricket in this country. I was surprised they were playing baseball at all, and was more than happy to encourage them to play a sport about which I actually knew something. They wanted me to come back and play again the next day, and I said sure, but then they realized that it was a holiday (Teej festival started the following night), so they wouldn't be playing. Too bad—it was a lot of fun.
I got on my bike to continue on to Rameshwar, but when the kids found out where I was going, two of them asked if they could ride along on the back of the bike. I said ok, and they got on, and I kick-started the bike, and we immediately toppled over. I guess I wasn't used to having to balance three people's weight. Luckily we were still on the soft grass at this point.
We got back on and tried it again and didn't screw it up this time. The remaining 15km or so to Rameshwar was a beautiful drive—at first we were just driving through cow pastures, but that quickly turned to hills and then to small mountains before we reached the village. At the village I parked my bike and the three of us hiked up to the waterfall, past a bunch of pretty sizable monkeys that were sitting on the sides of the trail. The closest ones were about two feet from us as we passed, but they didn't even move. As I found out later from one of the kids (it took a while because neither one spoke much English), we should have been more scared of the monkeys than vice versa, because these monkeys were aggressive—one of the kids had been bitten by one a few years back. One did bare his teeth at me as we walked by, but thankfully that was the extent of the aggression I experienced.
We finally reached the waterfall, which was about 40 feet high and which fed a large, muddy pool below. At this point the sun was scorching hot, so the three of us stripped down to our shorts and stood on the rocks and let the water hit our backs for a while. At first the water stung my back, but after that it felt kind of good, in a painful massage kind of way. At least the water was cold.
Then we went swimming in the pool below the waterfall. Looking back at the photos, that water really was an ugly shade of brown—but at the time I didn’t much care. Anything to stay cool for another few minutes.
We swam for a while, and then sun-dried and got dressed and headed for the Shiva cave temple. I guess I haven’t said much about Hindu deities yet—but all you need to know for now is that Shiva, Brahma, and Vishnu are the most important ones. All the others tend to be incarnations of those three.
We entered the temple, in which ten or fifteen people were praying, and the two kids bowed down to the Shiva statue in the back of the temple. I declined to bow, but I did let the lady who was tending the temple give me a little red dot of paint on the forehead and on the neck. I still don’t exactly understand the significance of those red dots; what I do know is that they’re called tilak, and they’re worn by most every Hindu I’ve met in
We left the temple and headed for the bike, but before I drove the kids back to their village, which was called Thikarda (pronounced tee-kah-dah), they wanted their picture taken with me. So each one took a picture of the other, and then they wrote down their addresses for me to send them copies of the pictures. Physical addresses, mind you, not email addresses. I'm guessing these kids had never seen a computer. Based on the look of their village, they may never have seen a TV either.
After dropping the kids off in their village, I drove back toward Bundi and stopped off to get lunch at a restaurant on the way into town. The restaurant didn't have any English menus, so I asked if they had palak paneer (the spinach and cheese dish which by now was my favorite Indian food), and they did, so I went with that. I got a lot of stares during lunch from the locals who were eating at the table next to me—apparently this restaurant wasn't exactly on the tourist track.
After lunch I rode to a monument called the 84-Pillared Cenotaph, which is exactly as its name describes it. The carvings in the rock were intricate and actually quite impressive, and I liked the cenotaph so much that I went back that night after dinner to see it when it was lit up. The cenotaph is 600 years old, according to my book, and was built to honor the son of the maharajah's ayah (nanny).
I got back to the haveli by 4pm, in time to let the Spanish couple into my room to retrieve their bags. I dropped by an internet cafe for an hour (internet is painfully slow in Bundi—all dial-up), got nothing done, and then went to dinner at my favorite lakeside restaurant, of which I was becoming the most valuable customer. I'd had enough Indian food for the day, so I got a pizza, which was surprisingly good. I went back to my haveli, and, exhausted and sunburnt, was asleep before 9.
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