christmas fun and fond farewells

Well, I have returned from my two weeks of vacation with my mom and dad! We had a really wonderful time together, and I have to admit that I was more than a little sad as their taxi pulled away from our hotel in Delhi, whisking them back to snowy Canada. However, the time that we spent in India was, as always, a series of ups and downs, but overall we had a really good time.

Mom and dad arrived only a couple of days after the mayhem of the Anniversary activities had calmed down. Shree was leaving the next morning, and she Sathyu and I only just had enough time to meet about my work before I faced off to the airport to pick up the parental units. Although once I got to Bhopals tiny domestic airport, I quickly found out that my parents’ flight was delayed by about an hour and a half. I paid my Rs. 30/- in order to be able to go into the airport to wait for them (apparently a mechanism to prevent fifty members of a family from turning up to see off one departing relative). There isn’t much to do at the Bhopal terminal, so I spent my time drinking Sprite, chatting with Prabjit on my cell phone, and reading a god-awful local newspaper that had more celebrity gossip than actual news. Anyway, the better part of two hours later mom and dad came through the doors looking a little worse for wear from the delays. But they certainly were a sight for sore eyes though! We had a few big hugs through he railing that separates the new arrivals, and then set off to find a cab to take us to Jehan Numa – the fanciest hotel in Bhopal!

We ended up eating at Jehan Numa’s Italian restaurant, and I even got to have to glasses of wine! Unfortunately, Dad got some sort of food poisoning from the pasta there, so was out of commission for his first day in Bhopal. I went and picked mom up from the hotel and brought her back to Sambhavna for a little tour of the place. We also went over to Ankeeta’s house with Prabjit, so she could meet the kids and the family. Shivani took some very nice photos of all of us with my point-and-shoot digital, so I will post some of them. After that mom and I felt that we had to go and check on dad, who was still sick in bed. Luckily he was feeling better by Monday morning, so he was able to come into the clinic and do some work with Dr. Quaiser, the allopathic doctor here at the clinic.

The rest of the week was spent with my dad doing work in the mornings with Dr. Quaiser, while my mom helped me to assemble the remainder of my model vagina (who was in need of another layer of plaster of paris, and, of course, the actual construction of the vagina itself. In the afternoons we went on various sigh-seeing expeditions, taking in all of the fabulous Bhopal sights; the Chowk and New Market, the mosque, and, newly discovered to me, the old Bagum’s palace. We went on a little day trip to Bhojpur, which was fun aside from the gaggle of men in their early twenties harassing us to take their photo. My dad also took a day trip to Sanchi, although I opted out of that one, having already been there twice before. He was quite impressed by the architecture though! The only interruption in our happy wee here was when my mom also got food poisoning from eating the pasta at Jehan Numa’s Italian restaurant a couple of days into their stay here. However, it was nothing too lasting, if nothing else.

We left on Saturday the eighth on a flight into Delhi, and found our driver, Ram, straight away. After quickly dropping he bag of crap that I has asked my parents to bring home for me at the left-luggage in the international airport, we headed off to the first hotel in Rajasthan that we were staying at. It was a place about three hours outside of Delhi called the Hill Fort at Kesroli. It was absolutely beautiful, this old fort on top of a hill that had been converted into a hotel. Each of the rooms are full of these little nooks and crannies to hide in, and there were little rooftop terraces all over the place. We got chatting with a few different people at the hotel, and got some suggestions from them about where to shop in Delhi – which proved to be good advice later on! There wasn’t much to see in the village surrounding the fort. We took a walk one afternoon in the field surrounding the fort. It was nice, but most of the kids from the area eventually followed us and asked incessantly for pens (which we eventually did buy at the local store).

After that we drove to another hotel another few hours away called the Piramal Haveli (a haveli is a mansion in Hindi I believe). The mansion was beautiful, as it was covered in the original frescoes from the 1920’s. Unfortunately we were the only people staying at the hotel, and the waiter who was serving us was a bit of a creep. During every meal he would hover uncomfortably around the table, interrupting us every few minutes to ask prying questions, and insist that we eat more. However, the real kicker was that after every meal he would insist on giving my mother and I each a kiss (which he kept attempting to plant on my mouth, but I quickly learned to avoid) and a hug. Euch! It was totally sleazy. When we checked out of the hotel he hovered around the front door, possibly in an attempt for some sort or romantic parting moment.

However, despite the lingering waiter, we did have fun, particularly in a town about 50km away called Malawar or something like that. The entire town was made up of old painted Havelis. I’m not entirely sure how old they were, but some of them were really quite spectacular. One of them looked very art deco, which was pretty neat. We ended up getting an hour-long camel ride (which was quite long enough since they are really quite lurch-y). Although it was more through some rubbish heaps than the desert, it was still quite fun! Mom and I did a bit of shopping in the town, and bought some fabric things that are somewhat like carpets, only not really.

Anyway, the next day after that we headed out to our final destination in Rajastan, called Neemrana Hotel about two hours outside of Delhi. Neemrna is really quite spectacular. It is a huge fort palace built on the side of an incredibly steep hill. They have done a magnificent job of converting it into a hotel, and like at Kesroli, each of the rooms are different and full of little nooks and crannies. We stayed in one room for the first two nights, and then had to move to a different (and much larger one) for the third night. Like Kesroli and the Piramal Haveli, there wasn’t exactly much to do in the surrounding countryside. The town of Neemrana was pretty lacking in anything exciting whatsoever, although I did buy a touristy camel t-shirt for Dan. The hotel kept us fairly occupied though, as there were plenty of places to curl up with a good book and read in the bright sunshine for hours at a time. The buffet food was really quite good (although the Indian dishes were a bit on the spicy side when compared to the food as Kesroli). So we basically spent three days reading in the sunshine and eating good food! I can’t say that I minded that sort of vacation whatsoever! We also spent quite a bit of time just exploring the hotel, which was and adventure in and of itself. We realized that the original structure had been added to, and the current structure was probably almost twice the original building. It had been so well-made, though, that you could hardly tell the difference between the new and the old parts (although the fact that there was a swimming pool and a spa should have alerted me that perhaps this was not a fourteenth-century Mogul invention).

After our time at Neemrana we drove back to Delhi, and stayed at a very shwanky hotel called The Claridges. It was really top-end, and, in order for the three of us to stay in the same room we had to take an “executive suite” which had no less than two giant flat-screened TVs and a luxury bathroom. I took mom and dad for a bit of a tour of Pahar Ganj on our first afternoon there, since it was the only area I really knew where to go. We ate at one of the guesthouses that I had eaten at with Derek and Prabjit a couple of months ago. Then we wandered around Pahar Ganj fr a while, soaking up the sights. That night I was rather sick to my stomach, presumably the result of eating too many greasy french fries for lunch! The next day dad went to Agra to see the Taj Mahal. I was glad that I didn’t book myself on that particular trip, since I wasn’t feeling all that great. Instead mom and I made some attempts to go on The Great Shopping Expedition in Delhi. I wasn’t able to do the all-out shop-mania that I had been planning on, but we did manage to go to a few stores and get some things in the afternoon. Our shopping was also limited by the fact that quite a few of the stores were closed (although not nearly as many as our tout of a rickshaw driver attempted to lead us to believe).

The next day we went to the New Delhi train station at the crack of dawn in order to catch our train up to Shimla. Shimla was the town up in the Himalayas that the British used to move the government up to during the hot summer months back in ye olden times… or at least until a couple of years after Independence, when the Nehru government realized how ridiculously expensive it was to do that. Anyway, the first half of our train ride was lovely, since we were on a Shitabdi train, which are like first class trains in Nroth America: spacious seating, lots of leg room, a full meal and a snack. We had to get off of that train at Kalka though, since in the mountains the train changes to a narrow-gauge track with a “toy train”. The toy train was indeed narrow. There was barely enough space for two adults to sit next to one another on the tiny blue plastic bench seats. Also, the train was clearly not intended for tourists with vast luggage, and mom and dad each had huge suitcases that wouldn’t fit (by a long shot) either under the seats or in the overhead luggage racks. So mom was stuck sitting with her suitcase wedged next to her seat and getting an ass in the face every time someone wanted to get by. Which was approximately every twenty to thirty seconds. Dad’s suitcase was pressed in the only available corner of the train, where a family used it a picnic bench.

We got in slightly late, but the other train was waiting for our train and one other one that was even later, so we ended up waiting on the cramped toy train for about an hour and a half in the station. Fortunately for us we were sharing a tiny car with no less that four families, each with extremely ill-behaved children under the age of five, so there wasn’t a possible moment of peace for the entire wait at the station, especially since the kids kept trying to run up and down the aisle to follow their fathers out onto the platform to whine for chips and biscuits. We finally set off at about 1:45pm and began the spectacular ascent up the steep hills. Everyone was taken in by the vast and beautiful scenery, and was sticking their heads out the windows to get a better look and the steep mountainside that we were slowly chugging up. The children started this truly adorable game where they screamed every time we went through a tunnel (there are 93 tunnels on this particular stretch of 103km track), which almost prompted me to chuck them all out of the windows… however, I managed to restrain myself, although just barely.

Then, about half and hour after we had started out, we stopped. And waited. And waited. And waited. It turned out that the track is a single track, and we had to let another train coming downhill pass us, since we had left so late from the station. So we waited about another hour there, at which point all of the screaming brats completely lost control and their idiotic parents did bugger all to try to make them shut up and just continued their conversations by yelling even louder over the din of what sounded like a million spoiled brats screaming. Dad and I got out and took some photos of the train in an attempt to get away from the mutinous children. Eventually the train started again and we continued the five and a half hour ride up the mountains.

The rest of the trip would have been fine except for three things:
1) The annoying children wouldn’t shut the fuck up. I realized that one particularly annoying child was threatened with a slap every time she started crying, which of course, only intensified her screaming.
2) We were so cramped by our too-big suitcases that I thought my back was going to break after a couple of hours (I can only imagine how sore mom and dad’s backs were). 3) A thirteen-year-old girl switched seats with her brother so that she could more conveniently scrutinize me by sitting right next to me. After about an hour of staring at me she finally worked up the courage to ask my name and where I was from, which I politely answered. I should have pretended not to speak English, because she continued to grill me about my home in Canada, my work in Bhopal, my religion (or lack thereof) and a variety of other banal topics, barely waiting for me to finish my answer before firing off the next round. In between rounds of twenty questions she would nip back to her parents and report my answers to them in Hindi. After a couple of hours I slipped my headphones in while she was off relaying info and pretended to be asleep when she came back. For the rest of the trip I was afraid to open my eyes lest she attack me with a fresh round of questions. Oh, and by the way, this was on Christmas eve.

When we finally made it to Shimla train station we managed to get a cab and then two sherpa-like porters to carry the suitcases up the steep set of stairs to our hotel. Dad and I split a beer from the mini-bar, and then we all collapsed into our beds. The next day we ventured out into Shimla proper, which dad very accurately described as reminding him a lot of Niagara Falls, minus the wax museums. There were such vast numbers of tourists roaming about my about 11am that it was hard to walk along the Mall (the main shopping street) despite the fact that there are no cars allowed there. I was shocked (and not completely happy about) the number of roving groups of young single men, most of who tried to take my photo with their cell phones as I walked by. The rest of the tourists appeared to be families with toddling children, all screaming. The only children I saw smiling (aside from the beggar kids) were two boys stuffing their faces with ice cream cones.

We did some shopping along the Mall for most of the first day, and then went back to our hotel to arrange for a driver to take us to the Wildflower Hotel. The hotel is about 12km outside of Shimla, and used to be the home of Lord Kitchener (or someone like that). It is absolutely spectacular, sitting at the very top of one of the mountains. It was absolutely silent up there, save the very distant hum of cars. There was even some snow on the ground (that’s where the photo of me with the snow-ball came from) as we “trekked” thorough the forested grounds. We only lasted about fifteen minutes since there was some ice too, and we were afraid that we were going to slide off the side of the mountain. Anyway, we had high tea in the hotel lobby, which was pretty fun too.

The next day we had the same driver take us to the monkey temple, which both mom and I had read about in “White Cargo”. The description of the author being attacked by a monkey for her food had only egged me on in wanting to see it, while it had suitably terrified mom away from the idea. The monkeys were actually fairly tame, and were being fed huge sacks of corn kernels by the people looking after the temple. They were really quite cute, although you do have to watch out for you glasses because apparently they can be quite mischievous. After that we drove to another building, which I unfortunately can’t remember the name of. It was some British person’s summer lodge back in the day… I think maybe Lord Dufferin. It had been turned into a study center for PhD students of something, so you couldn’t see very much of the inside of the building. But we did get to see the room where they had the discussions about Partition, and the grounds were pretty nice too. After that we went to another fancy hotel called the Cecil and had a nice quiet lunch there.

The next day we hired a car to drive us back down to the Kalka train station. Unfortunately the road was so wind-y and curvy that I was quite car sick the entire two-hour ride down. I still prefer the nausea to the screaming kids. Then we headed back to Delhi on the Shitabdi, and into our final hotel: the Hyatt Regency! Mom and I spent our final day in Delhi shopping (what else?) while dad toured around and saw a few more of the sights in Delhi. Mom and I managed to get a fair umber of places on that final day, including Dilli Haart, which I really liked. It was really interesting little stalls set up from people all over the country, so you get to see a wide variety of different crafts and things. We also went to the Khadi shop in Connaught Cirlce, and went through the Janpath Tibetian Market more thoroughly.

That night I said a tearful goodbye to mom and dad in front of the Hyatt. They headed to the Delhi airport (where they apparently had to pay Rs. 500/- in backsheesh to get in) to wait for their flight. I spent the rest of the night watching bad cable TV in the largest, plushest bed I have ever slept in, trying not to feel lonely in the big city all by myself. The next morning I lounged in bed, and spent most of the morning trying to pack everything into my bag (which proved impossible), and taking an extra-long, hot bath (presumably my last until I get back to Canada). I left my bag at the hotel for the day, and set off to wander around the city. I did a few bits of shopping that I had been meaning to do, including stocking up on gummy bears (which are impossible to find here), buying some brie cheese for Prabjit and an extra supply of granola bars to take back to Bhopal. Dharmesh happened to be in Delhi with some family from Chennai, so I met up with him in Connaught at about 6:30pm, giant bag in tow (note to self: no extra shoes when traveling, are a waste of space and cause severe back ache). We went down into the underground shopping area under Connaught where Dharmesh bought some nice new sweaters, and I examined fancy Ipod headphone knockoffs, but decided against it.

We headed out to Nizamuddin station and just managed to get some samosas as water bottles before getting settled into our seats. Unfortunately we were in separate cars, but I was sitting with a nice family with two well-behaved children. All was going well, and I thought that it was going to be a pleasant trip until it came time to pull down the beds for bed. As everyone else unpacked large woolly blankets, I realized that there was a strong cold wind coming through the windows of the train, blowing directly onto my lower bunk. “No matter!” I thought to myself, and simply put on a pair of jeans over my sweatpants, and an extra sweatshirt under my fleece jacket. Unfortunately, I spent the entire night wide awake and absolutely freezing, bone-chillingly cold. At one point I went to the filthy train bathroom and put on as many layers as I could manage: three pairs of pants, five shirts and a rain jacket, three pairs of socks, and a duppta wrapped around my head as a hat and over my face. Around 7am I managed to fall asleep for about an hour. Luckily the nice family woke me up when we arrived at Bhopal, since I was now too tired to stay awake.

I arrived back at Sambhavna to find things more or less how I had left them: Robyn (a volunteer who was only here for a short time amidst some controversy) had left, Eurig’s partner, Susan, had arrived. The hot water still doesn’t work properly, and the lunch sabzie is still inedibly spicy, but the internet is working and Andrea arrives in nine days! I will have to write more about our New Years Eve celebrations, which were an enlightening cultural experience and explained much of the cultural attitude towards alcohol here. But more on that next time…

In the meantime, I’m sorry but Photobucket is being stupid and I can’t seem to upload any photos. Hopefully I will be able to sort that out before too long…