Christmas in Rajasthan: Jaipur and Udaipur
#Yvr2Del
So it may come as a surprise to us in the West but Christmas is not celebrated everywhere in the world…and Rajasthan is one of those places. We started off in the morning of December 24 on an elephant ride up to the Amer Fort, which was bumpy yet beautiful and of course full of vendors throwing up “Maharaja” hats, other cheap souvenirs and snapping our photos. I had a blast because elephants are my favourite animals and our elephant “Bansi”, was the first elephant I have ever seen up so close and although cute, they sure do smell bad and aren’t as nice to touch as I had imagined. Once we were up at the top, there were guys that had taken photos of us riding the elephants that had (in the 20 minutes it took to get up there) printed the photos, made an album and found us to sell them to us — I’m pretty sure none of us bought them.
After snapping some pictures and wandering the fort, we found our favourite coffee shop, Cafe Coffee Day, which I recommend for those looking for a proper coffee like back home and grabbed a quick pick me up before we were on our way.
It was only a 6 hour drive to Udaipur, only 6 hours to the most beautiful and romantic cities in India…6 hours IST (Indian Standard Time) so it took us 12+ hours. The drive was full of many ups and downs, first Machine Gun (our driver) took us to this Dhaba — restaurants on the side of the highways in India that have the most amazing food — which was a bit smelly, and since we thought we only had a few more hours until Udaipur, we passed on lunch and ate chips and candy instead. We got stuck at the toll booth, which was incredibly long and loud, full of different horns, one longer and louder than the next, which I have to admit we were entertained by. Of course our car broke down and the closest town was 1 hour back or 2.5 hours ahead. I had the honour of being the only one that understood Hindi so the driver just kept reassuring me, although I also understood the Hindi when the mechanics told him that it would be a better idea to go back because there was no way we were going to make it. We had one more shot at another mechanic that may have been able to help a little ways away, where we thought we would have better luck and find a washroom. But again no luck and when we were told that we should try a nearby school for a washroom, we had an intense run in with an angry teen who screamed and charged at us, telling us to get out, so no luck with that as well, leaving us shook up and scared.
What was wrong with the van…the silencer…whatever that is, so we continued on with the van as loud as ever making sounds that were more than concerning puttering at a good 40 km/h.
You would think that this could be the worst that was to happen to us that day but it wasn’t, there was still more. We finally reached Udaipur and when our driver called our hotel for directions, they told us that they had no reservations for us there. They had given them to someone else!!! At this point, feeling every single emotion — angry, tired, hungry, annoyed, overwhelmed — we got onto the phone with the travel guy in Delhi and told him that he had to deal with this and we found a place to eat. After dinner, when we went to pay, of course the credit card machine at the restaurant didn’t accept our foreign credit cards and the ATM’s were all out of money (height of demonetization). We had a few bucks but didn’t want to spend it in case of an emergency, while we were attempting to figure out what to do, the hotel owner of where we were going to spend the night came in and saved the day and told us he would add this to our bill — our saviour.
We got to the hotel Laxmi Villa where we had the entire floor to ourselves, the boys went to freshen up while the girls were discussing what our plans were going to be for the next day. The hotel owner, Parveen, came and started talking about how he has a family event happening the next day and how he would love for us to attend for a little bit. In my head, I’m thinking it’s probably a wedding or a party so of course yes, however, the more he talked the less it seemed that it was going to be an enjoyable event. He described how his family is putting on an event for his Grandmother that passed 3 years prior and they do a blood drive in her memory and wanted us to be there. Katie bluntly and boldly cut him off saying that Christmas is an important holiday and we want to relax and enjoy our day and that we respectfully decline his offer to donate blood! He was not taking “no” for an answer and kept saying that it would be only a half hour max and that we could discuss it over breakfast. After he left, we looked around realizing that the hotel was designed as a place for people to donate blood with blood droplet carved into the doors of our rooms. We all decided that we felt very uncomfortable and that there is no way that we would be staying in the hotel so we started to pack our things and load up the van. We got on to the phone with our guy to tell him that we demand a different hotel that isn’t a blood clinic and went looking for Parveen who we thought would be downstairs photocopying our passports. From here, things went from bad to worse, Parveen had disappeared with our passports (8 Canadian Passports!!) and the guy that worked at the hotel said that he didn’t know where he went. After creating a scene (yelling and screaming from panic of the passports being gone!), the neighbours were literally watching the drama unfold, Parveen came back, all 8 passports in his front pocket and parked in front of our van. He was apologetic and tried to convince us to stay saying that they didn’t have a photocopier in the hotel to copy our passports so he had to take them home. Little did he know that we had spotted a copier in the lobby and made a copy, and caught him in his lie. He tried to stop us from leaving in many ways, he attempted to block us in and not let us leave and resorted to saying that we still owed him money for the dinner so we weren’t allowed going anywhere until we paid him and also that we used the rooms. I was sitting back to see the situation unfold and then I calculated the dinner in Canadian dollars, took the money out of my emergency fund, told my friends that I was going to “get all Punjabi on his ass” and went out to the car, slammed the money in his hand and told him to move his car in a non polite manner. He was taken aback and finally moved his car so we could leave. It was the most insane and weird couple hours of our trip and possibly our lives.
Needless to say, there has to be a yin to the yang and Christmas day ended up being amazing. We spent almost the entire day eating and drinking on the rooftops of hotels in the sun, wandering the streets with all the Indian people smiling and wishing us a Merry Christmas, drinking chai, handing out candy and our Santa hats to children and taking an auto back to the hotel listening to some awesome Indian Dub music. We ended the night with the boys, lighting off some commercial size fireworks off the roof of the hotel, which is legal only from the rooftops, not on the streets. It was not a bad ending to the most unique and exciting Christmas I’ve ever experienced.
