Leapin' Elephants!

 

Given that it's Leap Day, we feel like there's really no choice: Today is the day we ride an elephant up to the Amber Fort. My mother refuses since she is afraid of heights, slopes, and strange rides (along with speed and cold), effectively ruling out biking down-hill, skiing, hot-air balloons, and now, elephant rides. In a completely unexpected turn of events, my father opts out of the elephant ride, citing the fact that he sat on one in the Bronx Zoo at age four and still remembers it. This from the man who buys Peeps every year at Easter and hides them in the glove compartment.

This is actually my second time on an elephant, having ridden in Thailand in my twenties with my friend Andi, but that's certainly not going to stop me from getting on with my girls! Other than the joy of sharing this adventure with my kids, my favorite part of the ride is actually the fact that our mahut (elephant trainer) is on his cell phone nearly the whole way up. It's the ultimate ad for coverage:"Can you hear me now? Can you hear me now? Sorry, the trumpeting is so loud here."

   

Photos at the Amber Fort itself:

 

 

 

Another favorite aspect of the elephant ride is that two different entrepreneurial photographers take our photos and call out to us from the walls on the way up. "Look for me! I'm Tony!" And "Look for me! I'm Ali!" Naturally, I don't actually look for either of them, but on our way out of the fortress, Tony find us. He tries to sell me the photos, which he's already printed out, for 500 rupees, but since he and I both realize it's a sunk cost for him, I give him 100 and we're both happy. More amazing is that after we drive away, we decide we want to pull into a viewing point down at the bottom, well outside the fort. It is there that Ali finds me, and I give him 150 rupees for his photos, since we are  so amazed at the magic of him tracking me down. We still can't figure out how he knows to look for us there, since even we ourselves don't know we'll stop in that particular parking lot till it happens.

Jaipur is known as the Pink City, for obvious reasons having to do with the main palace in town pictured below, part of which is still currently occupied (on occasion, at least) by the local Rajah.

 

  

 

The Pink City is pretty in pink and perfectly pleasant, but frankly we are just as enamored with a temple whose name alone makes it unlikely to every be as popular as the Pink City, the Amber Fort, or the Taj Mahal: "Maharaja Sawai Mansingh II Museum Trust, The City Palace, Jaipur, Gatore Ki Chhatriyan" has fewer tourists, probably because nobody knows how to tell the tuk-tuk driver where they want to go. Consequently, it is very fun to poke around and explore at a leisurely pace without scads of people popping up unexpectedly in front of your camera.

  

 

The only problem with celebrating Leap Day with a six and eight year old on an elephant in India is that it will be hard to top it when they're ten and twelve. I'll have to start my planning soon.

Travelers' Serendipity

This morning we go birdwatching in Baradhpur, and that is all we have planned for the day. The rest of the day is supposed to be just a travel day -- a long, boring drive. So, in the way that these things happen, it is filled with wonderful surprises and turns out to be one of our most memorable and favorite days of the whole trip. For example, we see these ladies carrying rainbow-colored loads of grass on the side of the highway:

And a pilgrimage, working its way toward Jaipur for the Holi festival next week:

We stop at a temple along the way, but I can't tell you what it's called since it's not normally visited by tourists, and the name is written only in Hindi script. We have to run across both directions of the highway to get there, nearly causing my poor mother a heart attack. It opens just after we arrive, and so we are there to watch the temple-goers enter, ringing the bell at the front. They get stamps (like a Hindu third eye) on their forehead, and if there's one thing I love about Hinduism and Buddhism, it's how un-dogmatic and laid-back they are. So they warmly offer us the stamps, too, though it's so clear we are not followers. In the photo below, I may look like I have a worried furrow in my brow but, in fact, it is just my red forehead stamp. They also have the girls take rice puffs from a communal  outstretched hand, and I quickly usher them away, take their photos, and surreptitiously take the puffs from them and throw them away. The girls want to know why I won't let them eat any, and on our way out of the temple, a boy going in vomits all over -- then keeps going, presumably to stick his hand in the communal outstretched palm, too. "That's why!"

And finally, as we pull into Jaipur, our driver Dinesh takes us to see the Gatalji temple at dusk. It's not on our itinerary, and in fact we've never heard of it, but right from the start, it feels magical. First of all, it's run down -- but not too much so -- and beautiful at the same time. It looks like something straight out of Shangri-La, nestled inbetween cliffs. I take a crazy number of architecture and people photos here. And one of the things that makes it most unforgettable is that this is where we are swarmed by the monkeys.

 

Fatehpur Sikri, The Ghost Palace

On the way between Agra and Baradhpur, we stop at Fatehpur Sikri, which is always billed as a ghost town or ghost palace. It is, in fact, an abanadoned palace/temple compound, red sandstone and lovely. But I don't know why everybody insists on calling it a ghost town or ghost palace, simply because it is unoccupied. I mean, all the palaces we visit that are now tourist sites/museums are unoccupied. No tumbleweed goes drifting past. At least, not while we are there.

 

   

We do have plenty of cows and pigs and goats drifting by, however, between the main palace and a back temple area. We walk the gauntlet between the two, preferring the cows and pigs to a whole gaggle of the most aggressive hawkers ever.

 

At the back temple complex, we encounter a head-shaving ceremony for a boy's first birthday and a temple where you are supposed to purchase then donate string and fabric in order to make three wishes. Being more skeptical and stingy than superstitious, but still wanting to indulge Pippa's wish to make wishes, I tell her to whisper her three wishes into the temple through the lattice wall. This is always a risky move in our family, as Gigi just recently told us that she made the same wish at every opportunity up till her recent eighth birthday: to get a real fairy wand that would do real magic. Evidently, a Wii does not do the trick.

  

Here, again, our daughters are a star attraction, and people want to take photos of Pippa & Gigi as much as we want photos of them.

   

If you are interested in knowing more, this is one of the more loving and detailed descriptions of Fatehpur Sikri. We like the place, but I think this NY Times writer likes it a whole lot more:

http://www.nytimes.com/1981/11/01/travel/india-s-royal-ghost-town.html?pagewanted=all