Taj Mahal

bo

Trying to outshine the Taj Mahal - and succeeding

The Taj is a mausoleum, built by the grieving Mughal emperor Shah Jahan  for his dead third wife, Mumtaz Mahal 

The movement of the sun gives the marble a new complexion. To the right you can see the eastern gate of the complex, which is beautiful in itself

We visited the Taj Mahal first in the early morning, and we admired it again from our guesthouse rooftop at sunset. There I called my mom while we watched langurs jump from building to building and local kids fly their kites in the dusk wind, all set against the backdrop of the "Crown Palace."

From Agra Christina and I caught a bus to Rishikesh, where we spent our final days of this adventure together. Christina met her peers and took a taxi from Rishikesh to her yoga teacher training course eight nauseating hours north in Uttarkashi. I traveled to Delhi and boarded my flight west. I held it together until British Airways aired A Single Man. Then I cried in the lavatory.

Pushkar and Udaipur

Rah

Bathing ghats, Pushkar Lake

Udaipur Lake palace, the set location of Octopussy,which I have since learned is a terrible movie

Summer is pilgrimage season in Rajasthan, and Pushkar is one of the holiest sites in India. Devout Hindus make the pilgrimage to bathe in Pushkar Lake at least once during their lifetime, and also to visit one of the few remaining Brahman temples (Pushkar Lake was formed by a weaponized lotus petal that fell from the sky after Brahma slayed the demon Vajranabha). There are 52 bathing ghats on the circumference of the lake, including Ghandi Ghat, where Ghandi's ashes rest. The cramped streets outside the complex chime with street music, prayer, frying sweets, and the muted mooing of cows.

Udaipur, with its sparkling lake, island palaces, and steep sandy hills, is generally considered the most romantic spot in India. We wouldn't know. We barely left our penthouse, lake-view hotel room, though this in the most unsexy way possible. Food poisoning again, and this time Christina bore the brunt. As luxurious as our hotel room was, it still only had a single toilet - a sometime point of contention between an otherwise happy couple. Love is gross.

Jaipur

kings

The royal astronomical observatory Jantar Mantar

Jantar Mantar was completed in 1734 by Maharaja Jai Singh II. Singh was a warrior prince who nonetheless preferred the cosmos to the sword

We met this man on the street and followed him down a dark alley to his shop for a private puppet show. Sounds like questionable judgment now, but the puppets were very persuasive

The largest man-made sundial on earth

A swimming pool hidden in the hills outside Jaipur

Amber Fort

It was three hours past nightfall when we stepped off our plane in Jaipur and, before it melted into a flaming plastic waterfall, the airport thermometer read 102 degrees F. The breeze on the ventilated shuttle bus was a heated hairdryer inches from our face. My eyeballs swelled. We were in the desert.

But what liberation to be out of Mumbai! The desert forts, palaces, observatories, museums, and hilltop temples of Jaipur filled us with wonder and soaked us in sweat, but much of the joy came from simply traveling again after weeks of stagnancy. We spent a few days exploring the city, drinking fresh lime sodas to cool down and doing our best to dodge the Rajasthani men and boys who, to totally generalize, were fucking dogs. Though they were beside the point. Freedom was harder to find in India and this was our time, brief though it was.

Mumbai

mum

The Gateway of India

Dosas for breakfast

Racing home in a 60s era taxi on the Sea Link

Jetty near Bandra Fort in Bandra West

Dahi Batata Puri from Mumbai's famed Swati Snacks

Preparing sugar cane juice. Delicious!

Onion pakoda sandwich from a street vendor

Some street scenes feel uniquely Indian: a pig rooting through a flaming pile of garbage, raw sewage bubbling on the pavement, a government employee sweeping trash out of a bin and back onto the ground, rickshaws swerving around cows in the road. But despite its size and strangeness, Mumbai is less chaotic and less charismatic than the mega-cities of Southeast Asia. Mumbai's charms, most of which were edible, easily reshaped my view of Indian food (which I loved to begin with). Though when the food makes you as ill as I was, these pleasures quickly become regrets. ("Immodium: When that lassi blows straight out your ass-ey," was our favorite of about one hundred Immodium ad campaigns we came up with while trying not to get sick on a bus.) Buy a sugar cane juice if you can manage to find one. But avoid anything called a Bombay Breeze - it is a better name for a cocktail when you don't know what the city actually smells like.

Charge of the Pachyderm

Chit

Man-eating crocodiles patrolled the river, which was less than two feet deep!

Dirt bath

Our park guide

Christina was not smiling when this baby elephant wrapped its trunk around her hair and PULLED!

Rhinoceros skull

  

And from a distance we were comfortable with: the one horned rhinoceros



Chitwan National Park showcases south-central Nepal, a world removed from the icefalls and peaks of the north. For years Chitwan served as a favorite hunting ground of Nepali aristocrats, and a review of the fauna explains why: Bengal tiger, leopard, clouded leopard, marbled cat, sloth bear, jackal, mongoose, fox, hyena, gaur, boar, barking deer, antelope, langur, elephant, over 500 species of bird, and the headliner, the one horned rhinoceros.

I was beyond finished with jungles, to be honest. But Christina heard a rumor: in Chitwan you can ride an elephant, which masks your human stench, through the park while searching for wild rhinoceros. The crazed look in her eye when she yelled "MOTHERFUCKIN' RHINOS, PETER!" while she formed a rhino horn with her hand, charging at me with great force, all in a mosque no less, told me that we were not leaving Nepal before visiting Chitwan.

Riding an elephant is as uncomfortable as it is fun. Each elephant is driven by a lifelong personal mahout that pushes his feet into his elephant's ears, differing strokes issuing complex commands. We sat farther back in a wooden basket, rocking with each lumbering step, brushing off the frightful spiders caught from their web by our faces. We did not see any rhinoceros on our elephant safaris, which was unfortunate. We did spot families of horned deer, crocodiles, and off in the distance, Christina confirms, a leopard perched high in a tree.

Chitwan elephants labor hard, but only for a few hours each day. After the day's safari each elephant is given a bath in the river and ample time to graze. We were permitted to help bathe the elephants. Perched high on the elephant's naked back, feeling its thick spine riding between my legs, we were cooled by blasts of water sprayed from the elephant's trunk to its backside, which had been baking in the southern sun all morning. Either by its own will or by a sneaky mahout's command, the elephant dropped us (gently) from its back and into a deep pool of water. Feeling that your elephant is "going down" is a full-body panic that I hope to never re-experience. We climbed back on, no easy task, and continued the bath. It was a total delight

But we did not want to go on our jungle walk. Rhinos may be vegetarian grazers, but they don't like humans. If a rhino smells a human nearby, it charges. And if it charges you need to climb a tree, and climb it fast. I couldn't climb a tree even as a boy. Yet we were being led into the jungle to look for rhinos! We planned to tell our guides that we wanted to skip the hike, but some schedule confusion put us a lengthy boat ride away from our home, and the jungle walk was our ticket back. In retrospect, this was a turn of luck, allowing us our sole rhino sighting of the trip. Safely on the other side of the river, we admired the other-worldly rhinoceros sleeping, grazing, being stood and pooped on by crows, and eventually coming to attention at the scent of three nearby hikers. Finally spotting the rhino in dangerous proximity, the group's guide grabbed his clients' shirts and dragged them as he sprinted safely away.