India V: Orchha and Allahabad

It has been too long since my last post!  At this rate, we will never finish this trip, but I vow to move things along.

One of our last field trips in Orcha was a government-run recycled paper-making facility turning discarded garments into beautiful hand-pressed paper.  It’s a labour intensive process manually chopping up the bits of fabric, cleaning it, turning it to pulp, pressing and drying it. The plant makes all the university diplomas for the area.  The plant employs mostly women.

Women pressing garment pulp into paper. They wear improvised plastic skirts to protect their beautiful saris.

Example of the finished product: university diploma on wonderfully thick paper

Our last night in Orcha the group took a cooking class with a woman in her family home.  It was actually more like we looked on while she prepared delicious dishes and let us feast on everything! She gave us hints on making summer and winter (spicier) Chai tea and prepared Aloo patak (potatoes and spinach), Aubergine curry (store the cut pieces in water to prevent them from turning brown), Aloo Gobhi (potatoes and caulimflower) and chapati, all on a simple two-burner stove.

A rare group photo. Everywhere we went we received marigold leis.  Sad the number of flowers that had to die for us to tour India!  One member joked that our tour group name should be the “Marigold Massacre”.

That night it we hopped on a sleeper train to Allahabad.  I slept reasonably well all things considered, but the bathrooms lived up to their dismal reputation.

Amy putting on a brave face after using the facilities, sitting next to our tour guide who boasts a resplendent Gujurati mustache. 

From Allahabad we did a whirlwind tour of Nehru’s house, India’s first prime minister and father of Indira Gandhi, India’s first female prime minister.  The grounds were swarming with smartly dressed students.

Miscellaneous!

Interesting marketing in Orcha:

Travelling discretely in India….in a bus with “Tourist” stamped on it in 500 pt font:

India IV: Orchha

After Agra my group caught a train to Jhalsi and then Tuk Tuks to Orchha.  For the uninitiated a Tuk-Tuk (also called an auto rickshaw) is a three-wheeled vehicle and a popular mode of transportation across south-east Asia.  They are slower than cars and are open to the air which usually translates to a lot of noise, dust, and exhaust fumes.  Our driver seemed to like navigating his Tuk Tuk straddling the road centre line, making way for oncoming vehicles seemingly only at the last possible moment.

Orchha means “hidden” but that’s hardly the case these days.  The small rural town of ~15,000

used to be quiet, but has boomed with tourism in the last few years.   Our guide said the economy is now 60% agriculture and 40% tourism.  Some of the children have become enthusiastic storekeepers and were some were very insistent bursting out lines including “Promise? Come to my shop?”, “Little promise?....Pinkie promise?...Look into my eyes!”.

Colourful powders from the market

We stayed in luxury tents just outside the town which were a cross between cabanas and tents with canvas walls but had deluxe amenties such as air conditioning and hot water (sometimes).  

The hotel looked out on to the Betwa river; taking in the passing wildlife.

I had hoped it would be nice and quiet in rural Orchha, but another wedding raged through at least one night complete with techno music and fireworks.  A statewide election was also going on requiring “dry days” by law during which no alcohol can be sold.  It was a bit sad to see all the spirits up there with just some masking tape forming an X across the cabinet.  In the evenings I downed numerous lime sodas (club soda with a healthy dose of fresh lime juice) and masala chais instead.

Orchha was once an important princely state of central India, although its influence waned hundreds of ago and today there are only ruins left as evidence of its former glory.  One piece of Mughal architecture, the Jahangir Mahal, was only used for a single day and a single night by the emperor Jahangir on his way somwhere else  – ostentatious and crazy if you ask me!

Jahangir Mahal

One of the few remaining ceramics dotting the walls of Jahangir Mahal

Our first night in Orcha we watched the sunset from a narrow bridge which was beautiful, but somewhat harrowing having to move to the railless edge every time a car came by.  After a series of wide trucks I actually abadoned watching the very end of the sunset to make sure I didn’t get pushed into the river.

Fellow traveller Amy biting her nails as yet another vehicle forces us to the edge of the bridge.

But definitely worth it to see the cenotaphs along the river at sunset.

We scrambled off the bridge before this wide load came however!

I took a walk to visit the numerous cenotaphs (somewhat grim and imposing) along the Betwa river during the day.

I found an owl hiding in the ruins.

Locked gate before a garden in a cenotaph.  Almost looks like a gate to paradise…

Vultures at a cenotaph.

Miscellaneous Orchha moments:

Washing laid out to dry along the river.

The original swastika (Hindu symbol of auspiciousness), used for thousands of years before the Nazis and lingam and yoni (centre pieces decorated with marigolds representing the male and female “organs of generation”).

I paid a young woman to decorate my hand with henna.  This is before it has finished drying.  Henna art is a way for many Indian woman to make money working from their own home.  The woman who did mine lives with her parents and 3 sisters, which must be tough financially since few woman work outside the home and her father must provide for 4 dowrys.

Selfie after getting a blessing at the local temple

Modern-day Orchha: farming equipment alongside ruins.

  

   Framed bicycle

India III: Agra Fort

Still in Agra after the Taj Mahal, we had a long night kept up by a boisterous Indian wedding celebration.  Indian wedding season is from late September to January, and I was visiting right at its peak in November.  Unlike Western weddings, Indian weddings often last several days, have upwards of 400 attendees,  and may include long processions complete with the groom on horseback and a brass band (although increasingly today couples hire a DJ as well for the party afterwards).   It’s a lovely celebration but very noisy, it goes very late, and resulted in many sleepless nights on my trip through India!

Bleary-eyed, our tour group got up early to visit Agra’s Red Fort at sunrise.   The fort is another example of beautiful and imposing 16^th century Mughal architecture, mainly built by two generations of emperors.  Akbar (whose tomb we visited the day before) created the red sandstone walls and buildings, and Shah Jahan – Akbar’s grandson and the emperor who commissioned the Taj Mahal – added buildings of white marble. 

Agra Fort at sunrise 

We had a lovely 75 year old guide who drew our attention to the tall gates, high enough to allow an elephant with litter and canopy to pass beneath them. 

Our tour guide (on the right) had us guess what purpose this huge granite bowl could have served – possibly emperor Akbar’s bathtub?  Archaeologists still don’t know.

Agra Fort is an enormous complex and is more accurately a walled city than a fort. Just one of the many massive courtyards below.

Towards the end of his life, Shah Jahan was deposed by his son and imprisoned in Agra’s Fort.  Rumour has it he died there, in a tower with a marble balcony and a view of his Taj Mahal a few kilometres away.  This could have been the tower, although the morning fog obstructed the view over Agra.

Monkeys were scampering around everywhere you looked!

One of the cool, white marble chambers built by Shah Jahan.

Next we move from the big city of Agra to the rural town of Orcha.  Stay tuned…

India II: Agra and the Taj Mahal

The first full day of my two-week tour of India and Nepal was off to an early start with a 4:30 am wake-up call to catch a train to Agra.   Keeping us entertained were funny train station announcements including reminders that “sleeping on the platform is a bad habit” and “don’t be friendly with strangers”, each prefaced with a trumpet fanfare.  The train breakfast was distinctively Indian – something new (to me) called a “vegetable cutlet”.  It seems like they were trying to imitate a hearty English breakfast sausage but with deep-fried vegetables.  It was interesting although I think if given the choice I’d stick with the continental breakfast.

Our first stop outside of Agra was Akbar’s tomb.  It was built around 1600 on a large estate that now hosts manicured lawns, peacocks and antelope.  This tomb pre-dates the Taj Mahal, which was built by Akbar’s grandson Shah Jahan.   As was tradition, Akbar planned the site himself although it was his son Jahangir who finished its construction.

The four white marble chhatri minarets are similar to those of the Taj Mahal and perhaps inspired Shah Jahan (only two visible in photo below).  The rest of the building is mostly red sandstone.

“Akbar the Great” was a powerful Mughal emperor of a vast empire.  The architecture combines elements from Islam, Hinduism, and Christianity, some think in an effort to achieve religious unity.  Although not all elements are visible below, there were domes and lotus flower motifs associated with Hinduism, crosses for Christianity, and minarets for Islam.  Although difficult to capture on camera optical illusions with the columns and “whispering walls” (points of reverberation amplifying sounds many metres away) were pretty neat for an engineer.

A mix of religious motifs visible in the domes and decorative patterns:

Frolicking peacocks and antelope.  Funny how in India so many of my shots seem overexposed – the sun can be so bright for a Vancouver girl!

Intricate latticed stone screens called jali backlit from inside the tomb.

After Akbar’s tomb it was lunchtime (always delicious, this time Gujurati thali) and then to the Taj Mahal, one of most breathtaking and recognizable landmarks in India.

The Taj Mahal is a beautiful white marble mausoleum built by the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan in memory of this third wife Mumtaz Mahal.  She died during the birth of her 14^th (!!!) child. Sick with grief, legend has it that his hair and beard grew snow white within a few months and  he built the Taj in her memory. Construction took ~17 years and finished in 1657 requiring ~22,000 people including labourers, painters, stonecutters and artists, and more than 1,000 elephants to transport construction materials.

At both the Taj Mahal and Akbar’s Tomb, the four minarets on the corners are not built straight but lean slightly outwards.  Some think this is so that if there was an earthquake (and the area was apparently seismically active in the time before their construction) that the minarets would fall away from the main structure.  However others believe it was done so that the towers appear straight to the eye to correct parallax.

The Taj changes colour depending on the weather and time of day.  Supposedly the best time to visit is during a full moon where the moonlight gives the marble a silvery sheen.  Also recommended is sunrise or sunset with the orange of the sun.  In the winter during my visit there is persistent fog in the mornings, and so we went late afternoon and managed to catch some slanted afternoon light although nothing fiery. 

 Taj in the early evening light:

Unfortunately the Taj’s white marble is slowly turning yellow because of air pollution from Agra.  To try and protect the monument authorities have shut down all industry within 40 km and only electric vehicles are allowed near the structure.

 All Indians seem to want a trick shot of themselves holding the tip of the dome of the Taj Mahal. Kind of like everyone in Europe holding up the leaning tower of Pisa.

Fellow traveller Amy showing off the booties we needed to wear while walking inside the Taj to protect the flooring.

Example bejewelled marble inset inside.  I was taking a break from the crowds in a corner in a patch of light.  I’d never experienced anything like the crowd pushing you through the main tomb area.  So much noise, so many people, so many smells, and yet so dark inside!  This inset escaped unscathed, but sadly many precious and semi-precious stones were ripped from the walls of the Taj by the British during the Indian rebellion of 1857.

There were lots of school kids in uniform and some in casual clothes walking around the grounds.  Some of the boys were particularly interested in us tourists, asking to have their picture taken and posing, like this young man.

These lovely ladies also asked to have their photos taken and enjoyed seeing their own faces on the  screen afterwards.  An outing to the Taj Mahal was a very special occasion.   I hope I can still sit cross-legged at their age – so regal!