Travels in the Land of Kings

Travels in the Land of Kings

Last month, Danya and I embarked on our most daring adventure to date: a two-week family trip through the Indian state of Rajasthan with our kids. As we prepared for this feat, we realized that we hadn’t taken an honest-to-goodness vacation since we were married six years ago. Although we’ve done scores of trips to more than a dozen countries in that time, our travels have always been purpose-driven: for work, to see family, or to attend a wedding. We took some comfort knowing that Rajasthan is one of India’s most tourist-friendly states—its stunning forts and beautiful handicrafts drawn admiring visitors for centuries—but our excitement was tinged with a bit of trepidation at the prospect of such an ambitious trip (four cities in 15 days, with an antsy two-year old and rambunctious four-year old).

Our trip had its fair share of challenges, but the kids were wonderful travelers, and Rajasthan proved to be well-deserving of its reputation. We learned to scale back our ambitions, choose our hotels and eating spots carefully (with the kids in mind), and focus on enjoying our time together rather than cramming every last bit of adventure into our day.

The Pink City: Jaipur

Jaipur, Rajasthan’s capital, is known as the “Pink City” for the tint that colors the walls of the old city center. Within minutes of leaving the airport, we saw our first camel-drawn cart, trotting down the main road. We toured the City Palace, parts of which are still used by the current royal family. Kavi and Anisah were particularly intrigued by the nightly ritual when guards and groundskeepers sealed the palace doors with wax.


The next day we visited the Amber Fort, a stunning complex on a hillside outside Jaipur. Normally, elephants ply the steep path from the main road to the fort, but we arrived during a local religious festival and the elephants were enjoying a holiday.
The road was choked with pilgrims come to pay their obeisance to the Goddess Kali, whose temple is within the fort. Since we had no business to discuss with Kali (who is omnipresent in Kolkata), we skipped the long, snaking line of pilgrims, some of whom made the journey writhing on their backs or crawling on their knees in order to prove their devotion. The fort offered magnificent views of the surrounding town and the ancient wall that clambered along the rocky terrain. Kavi and Anisah enjoyed the fort’s labyrinthine innards, but were happiest when we found a café with serving chocolate shakes.
Jaipur is also home to Jantar Mantar, the largest of the six astrological parks built by King Jai Singh in the early part of the 18th Century. King Jai Singh was fascinated by the movements of celestial bodies and built a number of huge installations to measure the movements through the heavens.
Jantar Mantar means “instrument calculation” and it was built for serious business (the multi-story tower and sweeping wings could tell time with an accuracy of within two seconds). Even without a practical purpose, however, these structures are remarkable, which makes this installation of scientific seriousness feel like a garden of massive abstract sculptures.







We were fortunate to have our friends Martin and Hero along for the Jaipur portion of our trip. They joined us for a walk through the city zoo, where the howling school kids out-numbered the animals, and to sample Jaipur’s culinary and cultural offerings. We sat at a restaurant under the stars to enjoy our first taste of Rajasthani food (delicious, especially when accompanied by cold Kingfisher). Before the meal we all sat for a colorful puppet show and were surrounded by swirling traditional dancers as we ate our meal.

The City of Lakes: Udaipur

We bade farewell to Martin and Hero, who returned to Canada, and set out for Udaipur (via New Delhi, after our direct flights were canceled by Kingfisher—yes, an airline named for the beer). In a relatively dry and desert region, Udaipur boasts five lakes and sits on shore of the picturesque Lake Picchola. Our hotel in Udaipur was the fanciest of the trip, but the real pleasure was in the grounds, which had been a park, and still maintained a significant amount of green space and, much to Kavi and Anisah’s delight, a beautiful pool and small playground. It was in Udaipur that we realized how much the kids would have been perfectly happy to spend the whole day swimming and playing on a slide, with breaks for pizza at lunch and dinner. When we asked Anisah what she would like to do each day, she would invariably answer: “go home and see Milo.” But fortunately Udaipur was a fascinating city, with lots to interest the kids.

Udaipur’s most recognizable sight is the Lake Palace, immortalized in the James Bond film Octopussy.
It has been converted into a swank hotel, but we were able to get a closer look of it and the city’s other lakeside sights during a short boat tour of the main lake, which culminated with a stop on Jag Mandir Island, a second lake palace. Danya and I took in the sweeping panorama, while Kavi and Anisah rode on the back of a stone alligator.
When we visited Udaipur’s massive City Palace, it was decked out for a festival later that day when the current king would honor the horses in his stable. Polo appears to be synonymous with Rajasthan’s royalty, but I imagine the ceremony of gratitude traces back to when the royal families owed much of their strength to the horses in their cavalry. By their second tour of a centuries-old royal palace, both Kavi and Anisah were a bit jaded, but we learned to point out interesting details in the fabulous artwork, like the animals depicted in the beautiful murals and miniature paintings. (Fortunately for us, the Rajasthani royal families did a fair share of hunting and recorded the tigers, leopards and other prey meticulously.) When we scaled a nearby mountain to visit the Monsoon Palace, though, Kavi was quickly won over by the magnificent views of the lakes below, and both kids loved watching the monkeys play on the walls.

The sunset laid a soft coat of light across the palace and the lakes below, and it was easy to understand why the royal court would decamp to the hilltop to escape the heat of the Monsoon.

Our visit to Udaipur coincided with a series of celebrations to mark cultural and religious holidays. Over a period of several days, communities across the region gathered to participate in dandiya, which could be described as a traditional line dance, where the dancers hold short sticks in each hand. In Udaipur, the participants made two concentric circles, with women on the inner loop, and men on the outer, that stretched for well more than one hundred yards down a central road leading to the palace.
As music played over loudspeakers, the group stepped in rhythm, clicking their sticks with those of their partners across from them. After a few beats, the women in the inner circle would shift slightly to their right, thereby switching to a new partner every five seconds or so. The rhythm was communal, but the dance was loose enough to allow each person to add his or her own touch; some were more formal, others twirled their sticks or spun between clicks. The teenagers, in the way of teenagers in all cultures around the globe, made every effort to look nonchalant and uninterested, though a local young man explained that most of them had come to see and be seen.

The other festival taking place that week culminated in the creation of beautiful papier-mâché statues of Ravanna (most facilely compared to the devil in Christianity) that were then burned at sunset to commemorate the victory over evil.

The Blue City: Jodhpur

Both Kavi and Anisah were excellent travelers, patient and prepared to find amusement in any corner. Unfortunately, Anisah came down with a high fever during our last night in Udaipur, which meant we arrived in Jodhpur slightly anxious and very exhausted. Our first-choice hotel was sold out, so we settled for a small, quiet hotel in the same leafy suburb, a short distance from the bustle of Jodhpur’s city center. Our hotel had clearly seen better days, but still seemed to draw a good crowd and positive reviews. We soon learned why: the food was mouth-wateringly delicious. It turns out the hotel is owned by a royal family from Sodawas, a small town in Rajasthan with famous cuisine. We weren’t getting out into town much, but the food was good enough to make the day feel like an adventure. Drawn to the tranquil gardens, classy rooms and sparkling pool, we moved to our first-choice hotel when a room opened up, but could not give up the food—one night I snuck back to the old hotel and then crept back to our room with packages of Sodawasi cuisine.

When we realized Anisah’s fever needed professional attention, we were recommended to a pediatrician who had treated the proprietor’s children. She warned us: you’ll see his waiting room is packed with villagers, but don’t worry, he is very good. The doctor’s chambers were overflowing, and parents spilled onto the dusty sidewalks, clutching their small children, some hooked up to IV tubes. With our host’s assurances fresh in my ear, the crowd struck me as evidence of this doctor’s skill—people clearly traveled long distance and underwent hardships in order to seek out his advice. He had the disposition of a small-town family doctor in the US and calmly assessed Anisah with a few questions and a basic exam. We took our prescriptions to the local pharmacy, and slept well, confident that Anisah would recover quickly, which she did.
When Anisah was faring better, we ventured out to the Jaswant Tada, a temple built on the top of a hill overlooking Jodhpur. It was our first chance to see the many blue houses that earned Jodhpur the moniker of the “Blue City”. Some accounts say the blue paint hue signified a Brahmin (upper class household), while others say it deterred disease-bearing mosquitoes or cooled the interiors during the hot summer. My hunch is that all of the above played a roll, but the effect is wonderful in the clusters of the city where it is most common.

Considering their multicultural upbringing, Kavi and Anisah are often surprisingly unadventurous in their diet (especially while traveling), so while Danya and I were delighting in Rajasthani fare, we had to be more diligent in seeking out dishes the kids would eat. We found a Nepali-run restaurant in town that made a surprisingly tasty homemade baked macaroni. My favorite activity is simply wandering and hoping for glimpses of something new and unexpected. On one such wandering, while we were waiting for our baked macaroni to be packed, Kavi and I stumbled upon one of the most marvelous sights from the trip. In the middle of Jodhpur’s packed central streets, we chanced upon a huge, sculpted hole in the ground, known as a “step well.”
The sides of the well, which measured about 50 feet across, were crisscrossed with carved out stairs from top to bottom. Sadly, the bottom of the tank was littered with trash, but we could see the silhouettes of two large (6 feet plus) fish, prowling along the surface.

Most of time in Jodhpur was spent helping Anisah convalesce, and we began making plans to return to Kolkata before the doctor advised us to stay put, allow her to recover and then continue on our trip. Once she had made a full recovery, we decided to continue on to Jaisalmer, but detoured on our way out of town to see Jodhpur’s fort, perched magnificently on top of a hill overlooking the city.
It is generally believed to be India’s most magnificent fort, so it is a shame we ran through it so quickly. For Kavi and Anisah, the highlight was undoubtedly the audio tour. They did not seem to mind the total disconnect between what they were listening to and what they were actually seeing (which probably speaks volumes to how they experienced much of the trip!).

The Golden City: Jaisalmer

Jaisalmer is considered one of Rajasthan’s gems, but because it is a four-hour drive from Jodhpur, it still feels somewhat off the main tourist circuit. The drive itself was an adventure. The driver was constantly forced to stop for herds of cows on the highway, and a couple of times we were blocked by herds of dozens of camels.

We stopped halfway from a quick roadside meal, the kids distracted by the cows that nosed around our table.
The road approaching Jaisalmer is flanked by scores of tall wind turbines, the graceful turning of their high-tech arms at once both at home and incongruent with the ancient city. We arrived in Jaisalmer just as the sun was sinking in the sky, which added a soft glow to the yellow sandstone that earned Jaisalmer its nickname as the Golden City. Jaisalmer is remarkable because its fort is still inhabited, its narrow lanes filled with local residents and shopkeepers whose families have lived within the fort walls for generations. Kavi was quickly drawn to the many cows and calves that lived on the street in front of our hotel. With our meals served on the rooftop terrace of our small hotel, we watched the light fade on the walls the fort and the moonrise over Jaisalmer town.
We all enjoyed exploring the twists and turns of the forts ancient alleyways, which were filled with little adventures. In one neighborhood, Kavi and Anisah sat and watched a man creating miniature paintings, painstakingly using a one-hair brush to build a small masterpiece, one stroke at a time. Outside a large Jain temple, Kavi posed with two holy men whose spiritual zeal did not stop them from making a couple bucks from camera-wielding tourists.The highlight of our Jaisalmer trip, however, was our short camel ride. Danya and I hesitated, since Anisah had already made clear that she was terrified of camels, but decided we would coax her along. We drove about 30 minutes towards the Pakistan border and the Thaar desert before stopping by the roadside to meet Salim and our two camels. Kavi was frightened but excited about the ride. Anisah was just terrified, and not without reason: camels are large, snorting, ungainly creatures. Anisah spent the first 20 minutes of our ride with her face hidden in my shoulder, but she warmed up as it became clear the camel had no ill intentions. Our ride took us a short trip across the scrubland to a small patch of wind-sculpted sand dunes.

We arrived and dismounted just as the sun set behind the clouds. Kavi and Anisah forgot the camels for a moment and chased beetles around the sand dunes. Proving that entrepreneurialism is universal, a local man walked across the dunes with a sack of cold drinks, sold at an impressive mark up. The sky grew dark as Salim lead the camels to meet the car that would take us back to Jaisalmer and from there back to Jaipur for our return trip to Kolkata. The short camel trek was our final adventure in Rajasthan, a wonderful way to end our two-week trek.