BIKANER TOUR PLACES TO VISIT
BIKANER
We stopped a few times on the way to Bikaner to see interesting villages, and to rest. That's another great thing about traveling with a private car - trains don't stop and wait for you when you'd like to explore a market. At another rest stop I got the best chai (tea) I have ever had in my life, made by an old man with a prehistoric machine that he had to crank.
Finally, we got to Karni Mata Temple, the Rat Temple. It's a beautiful small marble temple, and it's crawling with holy rats that are considered reincarnations of people. There are bowls with milk and food, but rats run and perch everywhere. Not so many that you'd step on them, like in an Indiana Jones movie, but it's still a very creepy experience. There are little black pellets everywhere. You have to take off your shoes to enter.
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| Tea vendor on the road to Bikaner | Rats drinking from a milk bowl |
In Bikaner, there is a wonderful restaurant on the roof of the Harasar Haveli hotel, another tip by Rawat. The pineapple yoghurt here is great. I had the choice of staying at that hotel, and they showed me a big room with a huge bed, but I was put off by the mounted deer heads over the bed and the sitting room. I don't want the company of dead ornamental animals. So I stayed at the Raj Vilas Palace hotel instead, and got a nice spotless room.
Before night, we went out to the Bikaner fort, a gigantic red sandstone and marble palace that looks exactly like a Maharaja's palace is supposed to look like. It's a maze of courtyards, halls, and roofs. Guides are offering their service in crypto - someone talks at you and you assume it's English because he is looking at you, so you start processing and ten seconds later "ice owe jew blazes" suddenly turns into "I show you places" in your mind, and you shake your head.
Then I had some time in the old town, the usual chaos of honking vehicles, markets, and cows that slowly walk through the place as if they owned it. People sell fruits and vegetables off wheeled carts; there are bicycle repair shops with large stacks of tires, spice and nut vendors with racks of wicker baskets, open-air barber shops, clothing stores with their whole inventory pinned to the outside wall, chai stalls, a juice stall with a vicious-looking machine with big gears that turns meter-long sugar beets into juice, and countless others. Ad posters are often using strained English phrases like "live life non-stop" for a space heater. Well, yes, thanks, that's what I was planning to do.
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| Latticework windows at Bikaner Fort | Weapons display at Bikaner Fort |
There are lots of advertisement. Ads in Europe are mostly for lifestyle products that nobody really needs. In India ads are for things that people do need - mostly cement, although mobile phone providers are catching up. Ads for more expensive items like cell phone service tend to be in English. What you definitely won't find here are those nasty US chain stores like McDonald's, 7-Eleven, or Starbucks that pollute big cities in Asia.
The big thing in Bikaner is pictures, usually of animals or traditional Hindu motifs, in needle-fine accuracy. I saw a picture the size of half a postcard, of a tree with over 17,000 individually painted leaves. They can put black dots so finely that the picture gets an airbrushed look. They use only colored stones that they rub on marble, mix with gummi arabicum, and water, and paint with superfine squirrel-hair brushes on paper, silk, or sandalwood. True human ink-jet printers.
Tourist Information SRINAGAR, KASHMIR, INDIA
SRINAGAR, KASHMIR
Kashmir is an Indian state at the northern tip of India. It borders on Pakistan, and is a disputed territory that has seen a lot of violence in the 1990s. The Kashmiris are very unhappy about the whole situation and would prefer independence, but neither India nor Pakistan would allow that to happen.
The 2005 Lonely Planet guidebook, in its characteristic candor, describes Srinagar as heavily militarized, with paramilitary troops and sandbag bunkers, and looking like an occupied city. Yes, there are many armed soldiers at the airport and at city intersections, with barbed wire and checkpoints and all that. But I'd seen all that in the Thai Golden Triangle and in Egypt too; only the sandbag bunker was new. Just out of the airport, I heard gunshots but that was just soldiers training.
Srinagar has a beautiful lake, Dal lake, with the snow-capped Himalaya mountain range as a backdrop. At the edge of the lake opposite from the town, a long row of houseboats are awaiting guests. I was staying on the Dandoo palace boat. It's beautiful, all wood-paneled with hand-carved ornate patterns everywhere, carpets, old furniture, and all amenities. Of all the boats I saw from the boat, this one looked like one of the best.
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| Boats on Dal lake in Srinagar | My room on the houseboat on Dal Lake |
I got a very large room with separate dressing room and bathroom with a tub and hot shower, taking about a quarter of the length of the boat. In the evening I was served a delicious dinner, sitting on a high-backed chair at the head of the table, in the antique-appointed dining room. Tea here is delicious, made with cinnamon, kardamom, safran, and honey, and not bitter at all. The expenses at the travel agent were starting to pay off!