Rural India, Riding Elephants, and Wild Tigers

While taking a guided tour obviously limits your freedom, there are great advantages too. In Costa Rica I spent inordinate amounts of time planning and making reservations. This involved constant frustration with phone cards, hotel fax machines, and highly varied Costa Rican reservation requirements. Here in India I spend zero time worrying about these kinds of concerns and instead find that there is a planned journey or activity at all times. The downside of this is that serendipity becomes rare and moments of real discovery are uncommon. In fact, at times I felt like I was flying over India, separate and protected in our air-conditioned bus. Much of what I witnessed here was see through the window of a bus, taxi, or train. There is no doubt in mind, however, that I travelled much more widely in India than I would have if I was acting independently. This was particularly true regarding rural India.

We managed to visit small towns like Orcha and Mandu. We visited remote Bandavgarh National Park to search for Tigers. We spent an afternoon at Sanchi, one of the world's oldest Buddhist shrines. All of these places required lengthy journeys into the countryside and I'm so glad that my travels were not limited to urban India.

In Orcha, a small town on the banks of the Betwa River that is littered with Hindu temples, I saw men and women who'd come to the temple in the center of town for the Navratri festival to worship the Shakti (mother)/Devi (Goddess) for nine days. Navratri actually means nine days in Sanskrit. Holy men in orange robes and imposing beards sat in the shade for hours. One of these, bugle in hand, loudly announced our arrival with a loud bleat from the instrument. Chanting and drumming went on from early morning until late in the evening. Loudspeakers blasted highly rhythmic music so loudly that it was distorted at numerous gaily-lighted shrines. These seemed to be constructed for the festival in every town and along every roadside at regular intervals. They reminded me greatly of the gaudy Christmas decorations one sees throughout America during Christmas.

The Betwa was the only relatively clean waterway I saw in India. It's a beautiful river that carves its way across low rolling hills of tropical deciduous forest, exposing the bedrock below as bulbous white mounds of rock along the river course. On the banks of this river stand numerous ancient temples, many of them essentially abandoned today. I kept wondering at the neglect of historical architecture only to remind myself each time that care of such monuments is an incredible luxury afforded to the rich and often neglected even by them.