Ranakpur, mefloquine nightmares, explosions in the night
Things have been strange as usual. Two nights ago I woke up in the middle of the night because of what I remember as bone-shaking explosions within a few hundred feet of my windows. They were big enough that I felt the need to move away from the windows and shield myself with the bedding, waiting for some kind of confirmation of what I had heard in people running around and chattering outside. Nothing came. Somehow I fell back asleep quickly. At about 5 a.m. I woke myself screaming expletives at the top of my lungs because of some nightmare. That was really embarrassing, because where I am sleeping you can hear someone's fork hit their plate in their kitchen three floors below. I yelled so loud that I heard some people open their doors in the long moments that followed.
In the morning I remembered the explosions and tried to figure out what had happened. By late last night I had decided it was just another vivid nightmare caused by the mefloquine, when suddenly I heard some more loud explosions outside. Not as bad as the ones in my still mysterious dream/reality episode, these were part of a wedding.
The weddings here are wild. There were at least two moving through the streets last night, dancing, playing music, and blowing up "firecrackers" that anyone back home would call bombs. At every procession, a large entourage walks holding these candelabra-style lamps, each connected by long electrical cord to a primitive looking gas-powered generator mounted something like a donkey cart. Indian culture places a lot of weight on weddings and marriage. Almost every local I talk to asks me within a minute whether or not I am shadi shuda -- married. Then they ask me if I want to marry an Indian girl. I always shrug, of course, which prompts another round of probing and prodding.
Yesterday I went to Ranakpur. This was not as simple as I thought it would be. I got an autorickshaw to the bus station and after asking around found the bus that passed Ranakpur, a very small town 90 km northwest of here. The ticket was Rs. 45 ($1) and the bus left whenever it left, which here in India is known as "NOW". I got on the bus to wait and the only other person waiting with me was a young man with gratituitous medical bandaging covering his whole face and neck except for his ears and eyes. He looked terrible. I hoped that it wasn't from riding buses in Rajasthan. As it turned out, I did have to exercise some caution not to sit near any sharp edges. The combination of bus and road quality routinely sent me flying almost to the ceiling of the bus. My photos came out blurry.
I was the only outsider on the bus. A lot of people stared at me. When it was time to leave everyone started laughing at me because I was sitting in the conductor's seat, which was placed very arbitrarily several rows back in a place I never could have known. Like with the trains in India, when it's time to go, they just start going, and everyone who is still on the train or bus that is not actually making the journey jumps off while it's moving. Likewise, everyone still on the ground starts running and jumps in through the moving door.
The countryside was way out there. Very primitive. People sitting in circles in the sand, talking around little fires. Herds of animals being prodded along by wiry old men in bright-colored turbans. Irrigation systems consisting of big wheels with little tin buckets tied around the circumference, dipping down into a well or stream and pulling water up, all powered by cows walking in circles, yoked to bars of wood. Camels. I began to wonder if the conductor would alert me when my stop came. If I were to miss it I'd be in a seriously confusing bind. I made sure I didn't miss my stop. Ranakpur was at the bottom of a long and treacherous stretch of gravel road full of hairpin turns. When I got off I literally had to jump over several bags of grains (wheat, probably?) to get to the door.
In Mumbai I had felt like I had gone down the rabbit hole. Jaipur felt like one of the less desirable suburbs of Wonderland. Udaipur was just yet another twist on this road, and then jumping off this bus in this valley was something very distant from that. I maintain a reality check in two ways -- mentally retracing my steps and obsessively patting myself down for the few items essential for making my way back -- passport, tickets, money. The bus could barely make it up hills. Must have been an engine built for a small car. We made a bunch of stops on the way. Sometimes I couldn't tell if it was a real stop or just somewhere the driver wanted to hang out for a few minutes and talk to friends. Or both. At one village I was spotted in the window as the bus rolled to a stop and about five children rushed on and ran to me in the back of the bus to try to sell me fruit and ask me for my pen, rupee coins, or anything else I could give them. Half the people on the rest of the bus turned around in their seats just to watch me get devoured and see how I would react, I guess.
Ranakpur ended up being a big tourist scene. Hordes of visitors somehow got dropped there by big white buses with tinted windows and guides. I must have been the only one who wasn't told by someone not to take the public mountain transportation. Money in my pocket.
The Jain temple was beautiful. I won't get into it too much because you can see tons of photos of it on the web and in books. Very famous. Hundreds of marble columns, each completely unique in intricate carvings from base to crown. It felt good on bare feet. No shoes allowed. A guard came over and whispered to me that he'd show me the "kama sutra" carving and led me over to a very small section on the back side of only one column, where there were three little interconnected sex scenes in a row -- man with woman, man with cow, and man with man. His eyebrows rose proudly as his finger moved across each pair and he meticulously pronounced in practiced English - "man with woman..." etc. Then he turned back toward me and said, "now you give me money." Ha ha. The temple was too holy for shoes or leather but it seems that nowhere in India is too holy for the popular sport of squeezing rupees out of visitors.
Jainism is interesting. Wikipedia provides a good little overview if you are interested. One part of Jainism is a belief in the sanctity of all life and obsessive avoidance of harming any animal, to the point where some Jains even where masks over their mouths to keep from inhaling any insects. The temple at Ranakpur was covered with birds and I spotted several of the hugest beehives I had ever seen hanging from parts of its intricately carved exterior.
When I got back to the road, the bus stop was being guarded by a band of a dozen gray monkeys eating carrots. The terrain here doesn't seem like monkey material, but they are here. Actually, the terrain here looks a lot like California in summertime. Dry, sandy dirt, scrubby plants and trees covering yellow-brown hills and mountains with the occasional stand of palm trees.
I got back to Udaipur not long after sunset, feeling a little lost and lonely. It is very strange to be here completely alone. I haven't run into anybody else visiting India totally alone like this. Some people are very sweet, welcoming, and helpful, others just stare, and many others are outright mean. I've had some good times with a few other visitors, mostly from the UK. Spent most of today with a really cool guy from Scotland met a couple of nights ago.
Last night I woke myself up yelling two different times. Not quite as bad as the first night, but still not something I want to be doing every night, especially not once I stop moving around and sleeping different places all the time. I never did that back in NY, so I'm sure it's the mefloquine. Vivid dreams, some bad, some ok. It should fade. For now it makes India and being alone here a little stranger.
I will be staying in Udaipur tonight and then catching an overnight, 11-hour bus to Indore tomorrow evening. Today's bus to Indore was full. Indore is in Madhya Pradesh, a half-day away from Bhopal. As soon as I get to Indore I will begin looking for transportation to Bhopal and hope to be in Bhopal by the end of the 25th.
In the morning I remembered the explosions and tried to figure out what had happened. By late last night I had decided it was just another vivid nightmare caused by the mefloquine, when suddenly I heard some more loud explosions outside. Not as bad as the ones in my still mysterious dream/reality episode, these were part of a wedding.
The weddings here are wild. There were at least two moving through the streets last night, dancing, playing music, and blowing up "firecrackers" that anyone back home would call bombs. At every procession, a large entourage walks holding these candelabra-style lamps, each connected by long electrical cord to a primitive looking gas-powered generator mounted something like a donkey cart. Indian culture places a lot of weight on weddings and marriage. Almost every local I talk to asks me within a minute whether or not I am shadi shuda -- married. Then they ask me if I want to marry an Indian girl. I always shrug, of course, which prompts another round of probing and prodding.
Yesterday I went to Ranakpur. This was not as simple as I thought it would be. I got an autorickshaw to the bus station and after asking around found the bus that passed Ranakpur, a very small town 90 km northwest of here. The ticket was Rs. 45 ($1) and the bus left whenever it left, which here in India is known as "NOW". I got on the bus to wait and the only other person waiting with me was a young man with gratituitous medical bandaging covering his whole face and neck except for his ears and eyes. He looked terrible. I hoped that it wasn't from riding buses in Rajasthan. As it turned out, I did have to exercise some caution not to sit near any sharp edges. The combination of bus and road quality routinely sent me flying almost to the ceiling of the bus. My photos came out blurry.
I was the only outsider on the bus. A lot of people stared at me. When it was time to leave everyone started laughing at me because I was sitting in the conductor's seat, which was placed very arbitrarily several rows back in a place I never could have known. Like with the trains in India, when it's time to go, they just start going, and everyone who is still on the train or bus that is not actually making the journey jumps off while it's moving. Likewise, everyone still on the ground starts running and jumps in through the moving door.
The countryside was way out there. Very primitive. People sitting in circles in the sand, talking around little fires. Herds of animals being prodded along by wiry old men in bright-colored turbans. Irrigation systems consisting of big wheels with little tin buckets tied around the circumference, dipping down into a well or stream and pulling water up, all powered by cows walking in circles, yoked to bars of wood. Camels. I began to wonder if the conductor would alert me when my stop came. If I were to miss it I'd be in a seriously confusing bind. I made sure I didn't miss my stop. Ranakpur was at the bottom of a long and treacherous stretch of gravel road full of hairpin turns. When I got off I literally had to jump over several bags of grains (wheat, probably?) to get to the door.
In Mumbai I had felt like I had gone down the rabbit hole. Jaipur felt like one of the less desirable suburbs of Wonderland. Udaipur was just yet another twist on this road, and then jumping off this bus in this valley was something very distant from that. I maintain a reality check in two ways -- mentally retracing my steps and obsessively patting myself down for the few items essential for making my way back -- passport, tickets, money. The bus could barely make it up hills. Must have been an engine built for a small car. We made a bunch of stops on the way. Sometimes I couldn't tell if it was a real stop or just somewhere the driver wanted to hang out for a few minutes and talk to friends. Or both. At one village I was spotted in the window as the bus rolled to a stop and about five children rushed on and ran to me in the back of the bus to try to sell me fruit and ask me for my pen, rupee coins, or anything else I could give them. Half the people on the rest of the bus turned around in their seats just to watch me get devoured and see how I would react, I guess.
Ranakpur ended up being a big tourist scene. Hordes of visitors somehow got dropped there by big white buses with tinted windows and guides. I must have been the only one who wasn't told by someone not to take the public mountain transportation. Money in my pocket.
The Jain temple was beautiful. I won't get into it too much because you can see tons of photos of it on the web and in books. Very famous. Hundreds of marble columns, each completely unique in intricate carvings from base to crown. It felt good on bare feet. No shoes allowed. A guard came over and whispered to me that he'd show me the "kama sutra" carving and led me over to a very small section on the back side of only one column, where there were three little interconnected sex scenes in a row -- man with woman, man with cow, and man with man. His eyebrows rose proudly as his finger moved across each pair and he meticulously pronounced in practiced English - "man with woman..." etc. Then he turned back toward me and said, "now you give me money." Ha ha. The temple was too holy for shoes or leather but it seems that nowhere in India is too holy for the popular sport of squeezing rupees out of visitors.
Jainism is interesting. Wikipedia provides a good little overview if you are interested. One part of Jainism is a belief in the sanctity of all life and obsessive avoidance of harming any animal, to the point where some Jains even where masks over their mouths to keep from inhaling any insects. The temple at Ranakpur was covered with birds and I spotted several of the hugest beehives I had ever seen hanging from parts of its intricately carved exterior.
When I got back to the road, the bus stop was being guarded by a band of a dozen gray monkeys eating carrots. The terrain here doesn't seem like monkey material, but they are here. Actually, the terrain here looks a lot like California in summertime. Dry, sandy dirt, scrubby plants and trees covering yellow-brown hills and mountains with the occasional stand of palm trees.
I got back to Udaipur not long after sunset, feeling a little lost and lonely. It is very strange to be here completely alone. I haven't run into anybody else visiting India totally alone like this. Some people are very sweet, welcoming, and helpful, others just stare, and many others are outright mean. I've had some good times with a few other visitors, mostly from the UK. Spent most of today with a really cool guy from Scotland met a couple of nights ago.
Last night I woke myself up yelling two different times. Not quite as bad as the first night, but still not something I want to be doing every night, especially not once I stop moving around and sleeping different places all the time. I never did that back in NY, so I'm sure it's the mefloquine. Vivid dreams, some bad, some ok. It should fade. For now it makes India and being alone here a little stranger.
I will be staying in Udaipur tonight and then catching an overnight, 11-hour bus to Indore tomorrow evening. Today's bus to Indore was full. Indore is in Madhya Pradesh, a half-day away from Bhopal. As soon as I get to Indore I will begin looking for transportation to Bhopal and hope to be in Bhopal by the end of the 25th.
posted by Michael M. at 5:40 AM
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