The Travel Gods Must Be Crazy

by Sudha Mahalingam

  In the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, everything shuts down on Fridays—even buses. The few minibuses that do ply turn into millipedes by midday. They sprout several pairs of human legs, all sticking out from under the bus, toes pointing towards the sky, as though the critter has collapsed out of exhaustion. If you linger a few minutes, you realize why. The noon sun is hot enough to melt even metal; there’s nary a shelter, not even a shrub or tree anywhere nearby for waiting passengers to hide. Minibuses, like those in Kolkata, must have a minimum number of passengers before they begin the trip. The most sensible thing to do for hopeful passengers is to dive under the belly of the bus until the number of passengers reaches a critical mass for the bus to get going.

  On any other day, we (Kapil, my teenage son, and I) could have opted for a plush air-conditioned Volvo bus to reach my destination—Wadi Musa, the jumping-off point for Petra. But we happen to have landed in Amman on a Friday when everything comes to a standstill in the kingdom. We have no reservations in Amman, having planned to make it directly from Amman airport to Petra.

  I blame our plight on H and A, our lovely hosts in Jerusalem, who helpfully dropped a series of hints: that Indian nationals get a Jordanian visa on arrival; that Amman is just an hour’s flight from Jerusalem; that since we were flying Royal Jordanian in any case, organizing a stopover in Jordan for a few days on our return trip should be a breeze; that Petra is a drop-dead gorgeous destination, a must-do on any self-respecting traveller’s bucket list. To be fair to them, they did this only after a week when, like the proverbial Indian atithi, we had displayed few signs of budging from their hospitable home smack in the heart of Jerusalem. I bit the bait, promptly. Our gracious hosts even dropped us off at the Jerusalem airport, just to make sure. Perhaps H knew Friday is a holiday in Jordan, but I want to give him the benefit of the doubt.

  If I had been the right gender and a little more agile, I would have been tempted to add my own pair of legs to the line-up under the minibus, but for the present, I had no option but to wilt in the baking desert sun, cussing and swearing, ruing my foolishness in venturing into a foreign country impromptu, without doing any homework. It takes two hours for the beat-up jalopy to fill up.

  Eventually, we get going. We, being the lone foreigners on the bus today, are given the seat of honour, next to the sizzling and shuddering bonnet haphazardly covered with a Rexine cushion. The roads in Jordan are no doubt excellent, but every time the bus hits a speed breaker—of which there seem to be an inordinate number, quite unnecessarily, if you ask me—my thigh or shin gets toasted through my thin trousers, leaving angry welts on my skin. Like our own minibuses, this one too had stuck windows which wouldn’t shut, turning the inside of the bus into an air fryer. When I try to shift away from the bonnet, I put one foot inadvertently into a basket of soporific fowl that panic, cluck furiously and start spilling out and flying about, much to the merriment of the other passengers and the consternation of the owner. The live missiles are caught and returned to the basket and covered with a red cloth.

  Petra rocks!

  After four hours of this torture, the bus deposits us in Wadi Musa on the edge of the desert where we go looking for a hotel. For a town in the boondocks, its high street is littered with star chains—in fact, the highest concentration of five-star hotels anywhere in the world. We eye the Mövenpicks and Marriotts warily and look for a modest hotel that would not stress my slender wallet. We choose one that seems to be hiding in a side street, check in, dump our luggage and go in search of vegetarian fare.

  By now the weather has cooled down quite a bit. After some wandering, we locate a local bakery—a mechanized one that spits out one non a minute. We gape as non after non falls with a gentle thud on to the floor. Each is instantly picked up and handed over to the waiting customers. We grab a couple and buy a jar of hummus in the grocery. Our dinner is done, I announce cheerily, even as Kapil looks longingly at the shawarma rolls spinning like Buddhist prayer wheels. So I let him gorge on the Jordanian goat meat while I chew on my stringy non.

  Wandering through the ruins of Petra is exciting, and not merely on account of the stunning Al-Khazneh and the graphic art on rocks.

  Carved out of a single rock and an imposing 40 metres high, Al-Khazneh (or Khasneh al-Faroun) is named after a Bedouin legend that spoke of a treasure hidden by a pharaoh in an urn on top. Even today, the urn sports many bullet holes from those who tried to bring it down to retrieve the treasure. In reality, however, Al-Khazneh is a funerary monument, possibly the mausoleum of King Aretas (IV) who reigned from 9 BCE to 40 CE. Funerary symbols related to afterlife and death adorn the monument.

  Your ticket to the complex includes a camel carriage ride all the way to the ruins, a good kilometre-long trudge in the desert sun, but as you enter through the ostentatious gates there’s nary a carriage in sight. It is only after you have covered the entire distance on foot that you spot local transport.

  In their heyday, Nabateans may have been adept at harnessing precious water, but today all you can get, as you simmer and singe your way to the ruins, is bottled Evian. I shell out a king’s ransom for a bottle. The shopkeeper gets a call on his mobile which he presses to his flowing headgear and hurriedly strides out. I watch, jaw wide open, as he gets into his Mercedes parked outside the complex and drives off somewhere, leaving his shop to the care of his assistant.

  Petra, now surviving only through its sprawling ruins, used to be a flourishing trading city of the Nabateans, a desert civilization. Before them were the Edomites (from edom meaning red rock) who lived in the region around 1200 BCE. They carried on a flourishing trade in spices and frankincense, could weave exquisite textiles, craft pottery and were skilled in metalwork. The Nabateans followed the Edomites almost 600 years later and made Petra their capital, drawing upon their ability to harness water through their superior hydraulic-engineering skills. Nabatean ingenuity enabled them to transform this barren rocky terrain into a bustling bazaar doing brisk business, and the land around it fecund enough to sustain the city’s resident and itinerant population. The Nabateans managed to coax flood and spring water through channels and underground tunnels, store it in cisterns and reservoirs and direct it to palaces and settlements.

  Striations in a tomb in Petra

  History may have consigned Petra’s past to amnesia, but traders do their best to keep it alive. Once you have reached the ruins, dodging dogged donkey taxis that offer to take you through the obstacle race of the sprawling complex for an extortionate fare calls for all the skills you honed to perfection in the by-lanes of Chawri Bazar. It takes an Indian to haggle down a persistent hawker trying to pass off plastic as firouzeh—precious turquoise, found ubiquitously in the desert and used extensively in jewellery. Every hidden nook and cranny in this rocky paradise is colonized by hawkers who ambush you with their ersatz Nabatean artefacts: a deliberately dented and carefully patina-ed teapot, fashioned in the back lanes of Wadi Musa last week, is thrust in your face as you turn a blind corner; a tin necklace studded with pebbles is touted as one belonging to the Nabatean queen. But we manage to escape unscathed.

  Wait, did I congratulate myself too soon? After a couple of days in Petra, we are back at Amman airport to board the flight home. Immigration and security done, we are ambling to our boarding gate when I hear my son’s name mangled beyond recognition on the PA system. We hurry back to the assigned counter, where, without a word, Kapil, all of seventeen is whisked away beyond immigration back into Jordan while I am left standing on this side of the gate, in utter panic. Minutes tick away and there’s still no sign of him. I wring my hands in anxiety, but the woman behind the counter is inscrutable. The security guards look too fierce for me to make a dash back into Jordan.

  After about fifteen minutes of this agonizing wait, Kapil and a smartly uniformed officer appear at a distance. A helper is wheeling Kapil’s suitcase, its zip ripped apart and its contents threatening to spill on to the marbled floor of the airport. Kapil’s face is ashe
n. The officer explains to me that they found a shell in his suitcase and want me to explain why. It showed up in the X-ray and in a jiffy they had smoothly run the tip of a ball pen through the zip of his suitcase to prise it open and retrieve the offending object. It is an empty shell that he had picked up at a parking lot in Jerusalem, a tiny, shiny, metal object of the kind that fascinates a typical teenager. Without a thought, he had shoved it into his shorts pocket. It has come to haunt us now.

  All over Israel, youngsters conscripted compulsorily carry their guns everywhere, even to restaurants and shops. Many of them wear belts of ammunition too, a novelty for a young kid unused to seeing so much firepower all at once.

  After much explanation and cajoling, the officer relents and agrees to let us go provided Kapil signs some documents. All this on the other side of the immigration gate. A distraught Kapil is whisked back to a desk on the far side and made to sign several papers before being let off with much index-finger-wagging. Till date, he has no clue what he had signed on that fateful day.

  Pushkar: Creation in All Forms

  Pushkar, congested, crowded and dirty by day, is magically transformed by evening. Come dusk, the quotidian makes way for the exotic, exciting and mystical in this temple town sacred to Hindus and junkies of all denominations. The ghats, swarming with bathers and seekers of spiritual salvation, become bereft and silent as night falls. Another breed, seekers of a different kind of salvation, emerge out of the shadows; the gullies and lanes are now enveloped in a haze from their chillums. Elsewhere, harmoniums and tablas vie with guitars to produce a cacophony that rends the stillness of the night.

  Pushkar, the temple town in Rajasthan, 400-odd km from Delhi, is many things to many people. For the devout, it is the ultimate pilgrimage destination with its holy Brahma temple, the only one in the world dedicated to the Hindu god of creation. The fabled waters of the lake are believed to wash away the sins of the faithful who journey patiently from far and near just to take a dip in its murky waters. For the tattooed and bedraggled youth from Europe and Israel who come hurtling down the town’s narrow winding roads on their bikes and motorcycles, Pushkar holds out the irresistible allure of nirvana of a different kind—one that enters the soul through the miasma of psychotropic smoke or the intravenous needle!

  Serene Puskhar lake framed by the Aravallis

  Pushkar draws also the savvy trader and the bargain hunter, especially during the famous Pushkar Mela where tens of thousands of cattle and camels gather in the largest livestock exchange in this part of the world. While farmers and ranchers do their deals in the mela, the bargain hunters from boutiques in Delhi and Jaipur descend on this town to pick up silver jewellery, leather crafts, puppets and antique household objects; these will be carefully patina-ed so that they fetch antique prices in the fashionable districts of Mumbai or Bengaluru. And finally, there are people like me who wander into this town out of curiosity to glimpse a fading way of life in the desert town—one in which pleasure still means leisure, and lazing around is not equated with debauchery!

  Shopfronts sport brightly coloured puppets, their limbs dangling languorously. Cowbells clang as camel-drawn carts puff up the sandy slopes. Motorcycles slung about with milk cans and mounted by handsome men in oversize turbans hoot stridently, scattering helter-skelter pedestrians and street dogs alike. From a perfumery laden with vials of multitudinous sizes wafts the heady fragrance of a million roses; but even this cannot camouflage the odour of cow dung and urine that pervades Pushkar. Roadside eateries, right beside garbage heaps, do brisk business in malpuas floating in sickly-looking syrup. Distant drumbeats advertise evening aarti in one of the numerous temples that abound in this town. There are of course mendicants galore—bearded, half-naked, barefoot, ash-smeared, beady-eyed, all in search of prasad—of some kind. Wherever you turn, Pushkar assaults your senses as only an Indian temple town can.

  Of course, having driven all the way from Delhi, we hurry for the regulation darshan of Brahma temple. When I stop to buy prasad to offer to Brahma, the shopkeeper, who had been blithely munching the prasad from his own basket, hastily wipes his mouth and measures out the sugar-coated puffed rice crispies for me. I wonder how much he manages to sell if he stuffs himself like this every day. While he is busy with this transaction, a street dog grabs a mouthful of jalebis, also meant to be prasad.

  Next day we go in pursuit of some good karma—bathe in the lake and perform puja. The priest who officiates at the puja used to be a postman until recently. He tells us how the lake turned up millions of dead fish the previous year and the whole town stank for weeks! I spy flotsam—rotten garlands and detritus. We pretend not to notice and take a dip. A cow burrows its snout into the pile of my clothes lying on the steps of the ghat. Watching the cow from the water, my prayers to the presiding deity at Pushkar turn from the sublime to the mundane. ‘Oh God, please don’t let the cow eat my sari!’

  Having got the puja and holy dip out of the way, we are free to explore the many delights that Pushkar has to offer. We make our way to the edge of the desert just in time to glimpse the splatter of orange that the setting sun has carelessly dripped on the desert sky. The orange turns golden as the sun dips behind a sand knoll and the streak spreads across the horizon. But it is fronted by a festoon of plastic bags and a dead crow dangling from the electric wires. How did the polythene bags get so high up, I wonder. A political procession wends its way along the streets, kicking up dust and raising slogans. Geriatric American tourists haggle raucously with shopkeepers to buy fake ruby and silver jewellery.

  The next day, we wrap up our visit to Pushkar with a wobbly ride on a rogue camel that keeps drooling streams of saliva and dangerously lurching to dislodge me. I hold on to its hump for dear life and concentrate fully on not being thrown off. When I manage to complete the ride with my limbs intact, I feel as if I too have attained nirvana at last, Pushkar style!

  Punctured Andalusian Dreams

  You might plan a trip to Andalusia, seduced by any or all of the following: Alhambra, Granada’s Moorish jewel; Mesquita, Cordoba’s gorgeous mosque with its striped arches and doorways; Giralda, Seville’s towering minaret, crowned, rather incongruously, with a Christian belfry; endless olive groves; energetic Flamenco dances; eloquent operas like Rossini’s Barber of Seville; esoteric novels like Paul Coelho’s The Alchemist.

  But don’t let your imagination run riot. When my friend R and I land in Seville late one evening, what we find is a dreary town with uninspiring concrete blocks. The romantic-sounding Guadalquivir is nothing but a foul ditch winding its way through the town’s congested streets. Our little boutique hotel downtown is neither boutique nor a hotel. It is a glorified homestay, grossly overpriced, over-ornate and under-occupied. No, make it unoccupied. We are the only guests here. This was before the time of Airbnb.

  The manager-cum-owner of the property is a surly, pot-bellied man who gleefully informs us that the establishment has no boarding facilities and if we need a bite to eat we have to trudge all the way to the high street several blocks away. Booking rooms on the Internet is not unlike going on a blind date. You take what comes. He looks us up and down and, with a leer, asks us if we need a double bed or two singles.

  The bungalow is pretentious, with brocade curtains and silken drawstrings. When you open the curtains, all you see is a concrete wall. The place smells un-lived-in, musty, which the recently applied room freshener scarcely conceals. When R shuts the door of our room, she finds a tag hanging from the doorknob. Turning it around, she reads aloud, ‘Ne molestar’. ‘Wonder why they have to declare this? Perhaps it is customary to molest women guests in this country? Do you think the steep tariff for this dump of a hotel is because of this assurance of safety?’ she asks earnestly. I am tickled. Although my knowledge of the Spanish language is nil, from the position of the tag, I presume it is a ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign to be hung on the doorknob if you want to sleep late. In this forlorn lodge that does not even offer breakfast, it seems prete
ntious and unnecessary.

  It’s almost midnight when we make our way to the much-touted Andalusian ‘tapas bar’, drooling in anticipation of the epicurean delights that await us. It turns out to be a noisy, overcrowded, smoke-filled bistro serving an array of indifferent snacks! Worse, we are charged double for everything we order, and a volley of Spanish arguments—abuses I presume—pours forth when we point this out. Boy, the Spaniards can speak really fast, accompanied by expansive gestures, and never let you get a word in edgewise.

  But indifferent snacks and apathetic service don’t seem to deter the locals. And they are dressed to kill. Trendy women with backless and strapless dresses float in and out of tapas bars balancing on 6-inch stilettos. R and I seem to be the only women here with our shoulders covered and heels flat, so to speak. We feel suitably matronly and hopelessly out of place and beat a hasty retreat to the square where we can merge into the shadows and make ourselves less visible.

  But the square is so brightly illuminated that we stick out like a sore thumb in our frumpy attire. As if to accentuate our frumpiness, a newly-wed couple floats past, she in a dazzling white sequinned gown and he in a black tuxedo, clutching her rose bouquet for her. We wonder what this couple is doing here in the square at this hour instead of cosying up in their bridal suite and doing what honeymooners do best.

  The next day, we huff and puff our way to the top of the Giralda, the minaret, through a ramp on which horsemen rode in earlier times, my lens poised to capture the stunning view of Seville town it is purported to offer. Built in the late twelfth century, the Giralda, a lofty, aesthetically carved tower, is Spain’s most perfect Islamic monument. The belfry, a later-day Christian imposition, holds El Giraldillo, a weathervane that is also the symbol of Seville. Just as we reach the top, the bells of the cathedral start pealing, almost knocking us off balance. The camera flies off my hands and violently pulls on my neck, almost snapping it. Amidst the deafening clamour of the bell, we clumsily clamber back on to our feet and run back and down as fast as our arthritic limbs allow us. So much for our Seville trip.