Norbert wrote this to family recently...
...traveling around Delhi is slowly grinding to a halt as the temperature soar. If we can swing it, we leave the house between seven and ten in the morning (for exercise or shopping) and then not until the sun is setting in the evening (when it’s still hot, but at least bearable). It’s a pretty sedentary life, but I still get three climate zones: our room, which is nicely cooled; the fellows’ lounge, where I work and where only one of four air-conditioning units is working; and the hallway in between, which is closer in temperature to outside. The 45-second traverse is always an adventure, as is the answer to the question of what is functioning in terms of technology on any given day. The internet has been out for most of the last week, the electricity is always fluctuating, and the fax machine stopped working a while ago when we got a new phone system. It’s teaching me an ‘Indian’ attitude, which is to take it easy and work (more or less) with what I’ve got.
Anyway, we’ve also been fleeing Delhi entirely, and I wanted to tell you about one trip in particular. India is a huge and incredibly diverse country, so it’s difficult to decide where to go, but Susan and I agreed that it would be nice to get outside of cities at least for a bit. That still leaves about a million possibilities, so we decided to travel to the Bandavgarh National Park in the state of Madhya Pradesh (MP), which is fairly close, and a few places around there. The first stage of the trip was an over-night train journey, which turned out to be a lot nicer than what we expected. There are many classes on Indian trains—first class, second class, second class AC, second class two-tier sleeper, second class three-tier sleeper, etc.—but our compartment with only two bunks on top of each other and AC (at least when we were moving) was certainly a better one. We left Delhi in the afternoon of the first day and arrived in a little town called Umaria the next morning at 5:45 am. There, our driver for the next few days picked us up and drove us straight to our lodge in Bandavgarh. That little hamlet is a center for safari tourism with a variety of accommodation (we had to give up on the tree house because it was simply too expensive), and even our middle-of-the-road place was quite nice, with bougainvilleas hanging over our cottage and a little nature walk in the shade.
The main attraction of Bandavgarh is tigers, and that afternoon and the next morning we did jeep safaris, during which we were lucky enough to see a tiger each. The hotel manager, jeep driver, and (mandatory) guide kept insisting that we were not guaranteed seeing a tiger, but we wondered if that was just a ploy to lower our expectations and make us all the more happy when we did succeed (we didn’t meet anyone who did not see a tiger). The scene at Bandavgarh National Park is sad or hilarious, depending on your point of view. (A friend of ours called all Western travel in India “evil, evil, evil,” but we’re not entirely sure why.) The park, which is about a five-minute drive from most lodges, only opens its gates at 6:30 am and at 4:00 pm, and before that the jeeps start lining up. When the gates open, there is a mad scramble (kind of like most Indian traffic) to get in as quickly as possible, and then the jeeps race along various tracks in search of tigers. Either the tigers are always in the same places or the drivers and guides communicate somehow. We found the tiger, but so did everyone else, so I counted 30 (thirty!) jeeps along the bend of the road where you could see the poor animal laying in the bushes. Everybody waited around, and at one point the gorgeous tiger deigned to get up, stretch, and walk a few steps, at which point a thunderstorm of cameras went off. I thought I had a pretty good zoom lens, but it was nothing compared to what many other tourists had—lots of people had to have some sort of physical support to even hold up their cameras. Still, it was worth it: The tiger (a six-year-old female) was quite majestic, and I did get a decent image. By the way, not all the tourists are Western, but we are certainly in the majority.
That was our first safari (in the afternoon). The next morning, we went out again (same scene at the gate), but this time it took us quite some time of driving around (over two hours) to find our tiger. When we found it, it was too far to see from the road. (You can’t get out of the car unless you want to be tiger food—apparently villagers looking for fire wood in the forest occasionally get eaten, and sometimes tigers even attack the jeeps. Yikes!) Fortunately, there was more transportation, namely three elephants marching between the jeeps assembled on the road and the bamboo stand where the tiger was taking a nap. How she managed that with the racket of jeeps, thrilled tourists, shouting mahouts (elephant drivers), cameras, and not exactly quietly moving elephants is beyond me, but she didn’t seem particularly impressed by all the activity. With another couple we had met, we got on top of the elephant, which walked across a meadow to the edge of the forest and stood near the sleeping tiger for a few minutes. The tiger the day before was neater, but Susan in particular was extremely excited to have been on an elephant. All in all, the time at Bandavgarh was a complete success!
From there, we drove (eight hours, including getting lost on a road under construction) to a town called Khajuraho, which is famous for the erotic sculptures on its eighth-to-tenth-century temples. Our guide told us that Indian parents send their newly married children to Khajuraho to look at the sculptures for inspiration and that the same kids frequently end up in the hospital because the positions are so acrobatic—but our friends in Delhi said that was just a myth. Who knows!
Honestly, I was more impressed with the final stop, Orchha, where arrived on day five of our little trip. Orchha is pretty tiny, which in my opinion is a good thing, and there are fewer hawkers hassling tourists than anywhere in India we’ve been so far. Orchha is famous for its huge castle and fortress complex from the sixteenth and seventeenth century, but what made it even more amazing for us is that one of the palaces within the complex has been converted into a government hotel. In other words, we got to spend the night in a room inside a seventeenth-century Indian fortress. Wow! Of course, we also toured the rest of the complex, which was remarkable for its well-preserved wall paintings. I’ve seen pictures of Orchha from twenty years ago, and it’s incredible how they’ve done up the place. As Susan was getting an apparently amazing massage, I wandered through some of the parts of the complex apart from the tourist parts, and even those were spectacular. For instance, I finally found a series of two underground rooms under one of the structures. These were supposedly quite common in the past, as they stay cool even when it’s really hot outside—but at least in Delhi there are only a handful (if that many) left because of sewage, construction, and air-conditioning. Here, they weren’t even marked in any special way! Also, I discovered an old bath house, which had really deep (about six feet/two meters) bath tubs under really high (30 feet/10 meters) domed ceilings. I could certainly imagine cooling down there on a hot summer day! I didn’t even have time to visit all of the complex (plus it was already hot), so I hope we’ll have a chance to return some day.
After Orchha, we had a quick stop-over in Jhansi, where I convinced Susan to wander around a famous female freedom fighter’s fort in spite of the heat, and where we got a very nice train back to Delhi. The only strange things about the train were 1. that a security guard with an ancient rifle sat right across from us (though I suppose with a weapon like that the close vicinity is the safest place, since it’s hard to imagine it hitting anything he intended) and 2. that we got plied with food for the entire four-and-a-half-hour trip. Not that we’re complaining!
After all that, it was difficult to get back in the swing of things at JNIAS, but what can you do? At least we’re in a cool building here—as long as the air-conditioning is working… Keep your fingers crossed, and keep me posted on what you’re doing wherever you are!
Cheers,
Norbert.
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