Our trip to India & Nepal: Overview

Keith and I spent about two weeks visiting sites in northern India’s “Golden Triangle” (Delhi, Jaipur, and Agra) and in Nepal with an organized tour called The Treasures of India and Nepal, offered by AHI.

Click on the map to see it larger.

Our group was organized through the alumni associations of the UW-Madison, McGill University, and the University of Saskatchewan. Our tour director, Sergey Pukanov, third from left in the front row, is a charming professor of linguistics from the University of Tula in Russia. Our Indian tour guide is Ajay (still trying to find where I wrote his last name), second from left in the front row.

We saw a snake charmer.

Near the Amber Fort

Our Indian guide, Ajay, told us the snake was defanged and devenomed and that it would be okay if we accepted the snake charmer’s invitation to touch it. Our Russian travel director, Sergey Pukhanov, firmly announced that no one in his group was going to do any such thing.

 We rode an elephant.

We went to a nature preserve in the countryside for our elephant rides. Ajay made sure to point out that his company, Indebo, refuses to do business with the companies that keep elephants in the city. I was glad he acknowledged the value of treating elephants humanely, but I remain unconvinced that it’s in any elephant’s nature to give tourist rides.

We did see evidence that the mahouts (elephant handlers) placed the elephants’ comfort over the tourists’ interests. Although we had been promised an opportunity to give the elephants their baths, the mahouts refused when the temperature dipped too low and allowed us only to give the elephants drinking water and to refresh their painted designs. Interesting fact: Both mahouts and elephants start work when they are in their early adulthood, and their working lifespans are similar. So it often works out that one mahout and one elephant spend their entire working lives as a pair.

We saw cows wandering the streets.

Ajay explained that the cows are sacred in the Hindu culture and that killing one is a crime. We saw no effort to control their movements beyond honking at them. The cattle are owned and used normally while they are still giving milk, but when one becomes economically useless, it’s simply turned out to wander. Because people also believe that giving food daily to a cow (the first bread of the morning) is “auspicious” (a word we heard a lot on this trip), the cows get by. Families often have 'friend cows' that wander by each morning for their bread. The cows’ droppings seem to be promptly picked up, and either disposed of or used for fuel.

We sat down with holy men.

These holy men hang out at Pashupatinath, a UNESCO World Heritage site in Nepal used for cremations and memorial activities. They are smeared with ashes to remind us all of our origin and our destination. Our guide said some are actually holy men and others simply make a living by having their photos taken with tourists. I suspect all are probably some of both. Even holy men have to eat; and we're all holy.

We saw ruins in the wilderness.

More than one story line in popular entertainment has relied upon finding a deserted ancient castle in the jungle. I had always assumed this was fantasy.  Apparently not.

India’s inhabitants have been building stone structures for more than a thousand years and not bothering to dismantle them when they had no further use for them. If more of North America’s aboriginals had built with stone instead of wood and buffalo hides, we’d probably have the same thing here.

 These photos are from the Ranthambore Tiger Preserve. 

When I asked our Ranthambore guide about the deserted structures we were seeing in the wilderness, he casually explained, “Somebody probably lived there, or needed a defensive fort, or some maharaja wanted a hunting lodge.” The question didn’t seem to interest him.

From a few glances at the ground, I could see why they were building with stone instead of wood.  In many places in Ranthambore, the stone seemed to volunteer its use as building material by breaking naturally into blocks.

Can you see the tiger hiding in the grass?
Neither could we. We saw no tigers, darn it.
Hard to say how many saw us, though.

We got dots on our foreheads.

We got several different explanations of the meaning. It’s clear that the hotels and restaurants that dot your forehead do it as a welcome blessing. People also dot their foreheads when the visit a Hindu temple; in that context, I know it signifies the opening our a third eye, through which we can perceive spiritual, rather than only material, realities.

We learned to say “Namaste.”

Everyone in our group took eagerly to the Indian/Nepali form of greeting. One of our tour director’s first instructions was to refrain from shaking hands with the natives. It’s considered too assertive. Instead, you greet people by placing your palms together, nodding your head slightly, and saying “Namaste,” which roughly translated means “I honor the divine in you.” We all decided we liked it better than shaking hands. For one thing, you can give this greeting from across the room or when walking past someone like a doorman.

We saw the Himalayas. 

From a distance, to be sure, but we saw the Himalayas.

Something about the airplane's window glass must have interacted with the lens on Keith's camera to create this rainbow effect. We saw only the natural colors as we looked out the airplane window.

I don't know whether we saw Everest, but these mountains were impressive enough for me.

Next: The Ten Biggest Surprises, Part One.