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Ah yes, India
Nov. 8th, 2005 10:54 amI write from an internet cafe behind an assorted-things shop next to a foreign-tourist hotel in the town by the Ranthambore tiger resort. We went on a game drive this morning, seeing a serpent eagle, antelopes, spotted deer, deer with big ears, and, at the edge of some distant long grass through binoculars, two tigers. Only photographable sign of tigers was some tracks.
Yesterday was travel and another game drive; the day before that was Jaipur, with the enormous stone astrolabes of the Maharajah, the 345kg silver jars in which another Maharajah took water from the Ganges when he went to visit Queen Victoria, the Palace of the Winds, and an enormous warren of markets in the middle of which someone was dyeing sari cloth lurid chemical orange in a cauldron over a wood fire, with his adorable little daughter looking on. And a how-we-make-carpets demonstration. I'll be posting home some embroidered cushion covers and a wall-hanging.
Earlier days were more travel; Cambridge to Heathrow to Frankfurt to Delhi to the Chand Palace Hotel in Paharganj (a marvel of photography on its Web site, to show the black-glass frontage without pointing out it's in a four-foot-wide alley), across Delhi in the early morning in an autorickshaw for a good concentrated dose of culture shock, six hours in a bus to Jaipur.
In half an hour we leave to travel eight hours by bus to Agra. I'm told it's worth it.
No postcards written yet.
Yesterday was travel and another game drive; the day before that was Jaipur, with the enormous stone astrolabes of the Maharajah, the 345kg silver jars in which another Maharajah took water from the Ganges when he went to visit Queen Victoria, the Palace of the Winds, and an enormous warren of markets in the middle of which someone was dyeing sari cloth lurid chemical orange in a cauldron over a wood fire, with his adorable little daughter looking on. And a how-we-make-carpets demonstration. I'll be posting home some embroidered cushion covers and a wall-hanging.
Earlier days were more travel; Cambridge to Heathrow to Frankfurt to Delhi to the Chand Palace Hotel in Paharganj (a marvel of photography on its Web site, to show the black-glass frontage without pointing out it's in a four-foot-wide alley), across Delhi in the early morning in an autorickshaw for a good concentrated dose of culture shock, six hours in a bus to Jaipur.
In half an hour we leave to travel eight hours by bus to Agra. I'm told it's worth it.
No postcards written yet.
