Entry Completed On a Rooftop Overlooking Tea Plantations in Munnar, Kerala on February 16, 2014
My next stop in Rajasthan was Jodhpur, a beautiful city dominated by the Mehrangarh Fort, the most epic urban fort I have ever seen. Jodhpur is called “The Blue City” for its houses which are covered in indigo as a means to cool its homes and ward off insects.
My Introduction to Jodhpur
Sometimes, guest houses get really pissed off at rickshaw drivers for taking their customers “for a ride”, often charging higher than they should or even trying to drop them off at the wrong guest house. However, this interaction took the cake in rickshaw-hate:
*I just got off a bus in Jodhpur and had to find a rickshaw to get to my guest house*
Me on the phone with my guest house: So you told me to call you if the rickshaw drivers at the station were charging any more than 30 rupees for a lift to your guest house. Well, this guy wants to charge me 80. What should I do?
Guest house: Okay. Say this to the rickshaw driver: “go fuck yourself, you fucking bastard”
Me: Uhhhh… I’ll just pass the phone to the driver and you can negotiate for me. Thanks.
The city itself is extraordinary. While I was lounging at a rooftop café, I watched a troop of monkeys descend from the mountain and make their way through the rooftops of the city. Locals and tourists alike crowded the rooftops of the city to watch them parkour effortlessly across the cityscape. At night, I only needed to look up to see silhouettes of monkeys flickering across the sky. I would have enjoyed the sight even more if I didn’t have a new found hatred for monkeys in India.
I found this painting inside one of the palaces. I count 34 women in this photo. The king must have read The Game.
Where The Dark Knight Rose
As the backdrop for the desert scenes in The Dark Knight Rises, Jodhpur was totally a part of my Batman pilgrimage. I remember resting under a tree where bats roosted at night and watching in awe as they flew in and out, spreading out their silhouetted wings against the starry sky.
Seriously, how could you NOT film a Batman movie here?
That circle is the "prison" that Batman climbed out of during The Dark Knight Rises. So the prison was photoshopped, but if it were real I would have wanted to visit it.
Most of the darkest crannies of Rajasthan's forts are soaked with the sour stench of bats
A Local Family Experience
Sometimes there are benefits to travelling solo. I needed someone to help me take a photo and saw a young man playing catch with a boy at the fort’s parking lot. We started chatting and it turns out Shyam is a PhD candidate in Electrical Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology at Delhi (ie. He is an insanely smart man). He invited me to his home for dinner and I gladly took up the offer to get a glimpse of family life in India. We had a great conversation about philosophy and shared an incredible meal. His family was curious about my story and I spent some time chatting with them too.
It was one of the coolest experiences I had in India to date and I doubt it would have happened if I weren’t travelling alone. I will meet up with Shyam later when I visit Delhi and hopefully he can show me around India's famous IIT campus.
Our photo taken by Shyam's nephew. This was a very traditional meal in India. We sat on the floor and ate with our hands, something I'm getting a lot better at every day!
Off The Beaten Track to Creepiness
As much as I loved Jodhpur, in usual Henry style I wanted to get off the beaten track and decided to check out a historic small town called Bundi. It is a place full of history, charm and… creepiness. Everybody in the town was excessively nice to the point where it just seemed weird.
I stayed in a 450 year old guest house for $4/night with a lovely overly welcoming family. The Hadi Rani guest house was named after one of the most revered queens in Bundi history. It was a time of war and Hadi’s newlywed husband looked faint at heart as he was leaving her to head to the front lines of battle. In an act to prevent him from having a cowardly excuse to return to his lovely wife, she heroically cut off her own head with a single stroke. He won the war so I guess she did something right.
This painting was hanging right outside my room. Yes, she cut off her own head. Yes, her neck is spewing blood everywhere. Yes, there is blood dripping off her sword. Yes, she is still smiling
They built this weird gnome display in the corner of my room. It was creepy as fuck.
On top of the overall weirdness of the place, there was some eerie charm to it as well. There was a wind chime in the main courtyard that sounded more melodic than your ordinary wind chimes. In any other circumstance, it would’ve added character, but in a place like Bundi that wind chime totally gave me the shivers at night. The windows blasted open in the middle of my first night in Bundi with the curtains flapping madly against the wind. I was ready to shat my pants.
At least the town itself was quite spectacular. The palace was pretty amazing for a place off the beaten track.
My Journey to Bhangarh, the Most Haunted Place in India
As if I didn’t get enough of the creeps in Bundi, I decided to make a trip to Bhangarh a couple days later. Bhangarh is the only place in India (and in the world that I know of) which is legally haunted. As in, nobody is legally allowed to stay there overnight because anybody that has tried was never seen again.
Anyways, I went there during the daytime and there was nothing eerie about the place at all. I was contemplating setting up some video cameras at night but never got around to it. The only thing scary that happened to me was a large macaque that jumped me to get one of my bananas. I’m really starting to hate monkeys here.
My best scary ghost pose
I think the ghost stories are a load of bull. Besides the bad pun, I want to call this guy "The Decimator". Everyone in the town was scared as hell of him. He was MASSIVE and devouring everything in his path. I watched him eat a whole 6-pack beer carton. What a beast.
I Love Local Experiences
My local bus to Bhangarh was another bone rattler. Local buses in Rajasthan have a glass-separated compartment for the bus driver with a side bench inside for overflow passengers. As I moved my big backpack to the driver compartment to create more space for other passengers, a young boy and his mother on the side bench excitedly beckoned me over to sit with them.
They were so pumped to have me there even though there was a clear language barrier. It was an amazing local interaction and the young boy was awesome.
Boy: Your name?
Me: Henry
Boy: Which… village are you from?
Me: Um… I am from the village of Canada
Boy: Oh. Very nice village! Which… village will you go next?
Me: Next, I will go to the village of Nepal
Boy: *Huge smile beams over his face*
I was laughing so freaking hard. They got off the bus to catch the next leg of their travels and I wished them a safe journey. I love the locals here.
Breaking My Comfort Zones
I started to realize that I was almost getting into a travel routine of taking photos, processing them, then blogging about my experiences. I decided to do something FUN and get out of my comfort zone. There’s a British company here called Flying Fox that operates a zip-line experience at the Mehrangarh Fort and it was just epic blasting back and forth across the fort and the valley beneath it.
Did I mention I am scared of heights?
Zipping back and forth across this valley was one of the most fun moments I had in India
I explored an abandoned fort in Bundi. Now overgrown with vegetation and falling apart, it is nothing more than an echo of an empire long passed. It was just great to get away from the regular tourist crowds.
I had to go through this weird doggy door to get into the fort
I rambled around and wanted to see if I could get to the top of the complex. I saw this broken staircase and nearly abandoned my mission. I had pretty much zero faith that it would support my weight because it was missing a supporting step. The drop was enough to break my ankles and there would have been nobody around to help me.
I don’t mind taking risks but they have to be calculated. This was a stupid risk to take. In the worst case scenario, I would have been stranded there overnight in an area littered with testosterone-charged macaques.
The missing staircase. Doesn't look like a big deal but this kind of stuff freaks me out.
Victory face!
The view from the top of the fort. Doesn't look like much but I got it to myself and did some meditation.
After a few hours of rest I explored the fort some more and finally ran into some people. They were excited to get a photo taken with me.
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