Welcome to Jaipur: the so-called 'Pink City'Some snaps of Jaipur, the capital of Rajasthan. This was my final stop in this great and diverse Indian state. It was a place I had greatly anticipated exploring. But, as I was warned by some fellow travellers during my trip, I began to feel the “Jaipur grind” after a few days. Expectations have not fully met reality and past experience. It’s a busy, sprawling, impersonal city and once you knock off the main attractions (which seem plentiful, but can be easily visited in a short span of time) it can feel as though you’re at a loss of what to do next... My advice for Jaipur: best take it slow. Sit at cafes. Reflect on the ups and downs of the trip so far. Plan ahead. Watch the world go by. Compose wistful and semi-informative blog posts. I was also completely outraged by something else. Jaipur is famously called the “Pink City of India”. Now, I don’t know about you but nothing here looks remotely pink. More an orangey-red. This is surely the true Indian scam! I demand my bloody paisas back. The Amber Fort: glorious and elephant congestedThe Amber Fort! Once the fortress residence of the Jaipur royal family. Rajput and Mughal architecture blended into a big pile of sandstone and marble. I felt mild Potala Palace vibes, as well as Great Wall of China memories from the endless, winding defensive walls on the hills all around the central fort. Admittedly, it is not my favourite Indian fort (that title goes to Mehrangarh Fort in Jodhpur) but it’s utterly majestic in the morning light. Just remember not to take the touristy elephant rides to the top. It is not a terribly ethical thing to do. Like with many grand Indian buildings, the Amber Fort mainly inspiring from the outside. Apart from one or two impressive rooms, the interiors are bare-boned with semi-recent restoration work is evident throughout. The same can be said for the City Palace and Hawa Mahal, two other major attractions in the city. This is not an India specific problem, mind you. China too suffers the same issue with many of its large heritage structures. But whereas the scant interiors of China can be explained by events like the Cultural Revolution, which gutted the entire country of its historical wealth, the reason here seems more opaque. Hypothesis: It's a result of the anarchic, predatory impact of the British East India Company and direct Crown rule, compounded by a lack of modern state capacity to prioritise and preserve the country’s almost countless cultural sites. Quick notes on Hawa Mahal and Jantar Mantar...Hawa Mahal: “The Palace of Winds”, famed for its intricate (and potentially trypophobia inducing) hive-like window design. Not much to see on the inside. Best viewed from a pricey, hipster rooftop cafe in the area. Jantar Mantar: Is it a highfalutin contemporary sculpture garden? Or a set of enormous and sophisticated 18th century astronomical instruments commissioned by Maharaja Jai Singh II of Jaipur? You decide! Temple run: Jaipur editionPhotos of various forts and temples on the hills surrounding Jaipur. My overall impression: utilitarian strongholds, rundown holy sites, plenty of monkeys. My discontented rickshaw driver rushed me around Nahargarh and Jaigarh Fort and was mainly interested in taking me to a crappy commission-paying shop (an expected side effect of a cheap hire). I’m also fairly sure that the trivial entrance fee the holy men charged for visiting the Galta Ji temple complex was a half-hearted scam. Whatever. These things happen. A personal note to a future self: I need to stop stumbling into temple blessings out of boredom. I mean, I don’t believe in any of it and I don’t like having stuff put on my forehead or wrapped around my wrists (I remove them the moment I leave). Karma, reincarnation, curses, blessings, deities, prayers, sacrifices, all of it — I respect them up to a solid threshold, and I often find them intellectually absorbing to observe, but I should endeavour to keep them away from me with a much longer stick. The Palace and the MuseumThe City Palace of Jaipur. It’s alright. Had some cool archways and doors, I guess. The lavish throne room had pigeons flying around and shitting in it. The weapons gallery (i.e. “the murder wing”) showcased all the ingenious ways Indians tried to attach firearms to other weapons. Gun-swords. Gun-maces. Gun-crossbows. Gun-daggers. Sneaky-cane-swords-that-were-also-cane-guns. The best corner of the palace was undoubtedly the painting and photography gallery. For one, it was dark and cool and cleverly curated; for another, there were few visitors and no guided tour groups. I can’t abide by paid museum guides. Museums are the ultimate space for me to exercise my introversion. Keep my own pace. Get away from the world. Study whatever displays catch my idiosyncratic attention. Speaking of museums, the Albert Hall Museum was a pleasant surprise. I expected it to be lacklustre and only went because I was in that part of town. I think my favourite artefacts of India are its miniature paintings (where all the Deccan, Mughal, Rajput, etc. paintings look like they were all done by the same ten guys) and its remarkable religious sculptures. And with Jaipur completed, I was finally done with Rajasthan! Afterwards, I took the train to this super obscure, off-the-beaten-path place called Agra. Dunno if you’ve ever heard of it but it has some well-regarded stuff.
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Life on the Nile...When I was in Egypt at the start of 2020, I was exclusively travelling by train up and down the course of the Nile. The view out the window is, at times, utterly striking. From one side, you can see rich agricultural lands, palm-lined islands, lazy feluccas on the water, and dense urban development. From the other, all you see is uninhabitable desolation. Egypt is a country beset on all sides by wastelands, desperately hugging a single, riverine lifeline. Banks of prosperity sharply demarcated by arid nothingness, with no gradients between the two. This is a country that stuns you with the notion of geography as destiny. The train took me to Aswan — a small, laid-back city in the deep south of Egypt. Some of my best days in Egypt was spent here. I joined a group of couch surfers and their hosts in Aswan to go swimming in the Nile, followed up by a gorgeous sunset view from atop a desert escarpment. A dip in the Nile? I ain’t afraid of no crocodiles! The water was freezing, however. Downing a can of Stella, the de facto national beer of Egypt, helped with my recovery. And it’s a surprisingly passable beer for a Muslim majority country. Beer was, after all, a lower-class staple in ancient, wheat-intensive Egypt. Let us give thanks to grain agriculture for (a) enabling the rise of oppressive, megaproject funding, centralised tax systems in early societies, and (b) creating booze for the plebian masses. Welcome to Philae! Ancient ruins, many over 3,300 years old, on a picturesque island in the middle of a reservoir. Accessible only by boat, the island includes a temple to Isis, the goddess of fertility, and was also worked on by Ptolemaic and Roman builders, as well as later Christian ones (who stamped very noticeable Coptic crosses into the pagan stonework). Further, the whole complex was lifted up and relocated to its current location in the 1960s to save it from flooding as a result of a new dam project. Interesting... right? Okay, time for a story! If much of Egypt’s past glory can be credited to the Nile, then a huge chunk of its 20th-century history can be credited to the construction of the Aswan High Dam. Since the dawn of Egyptian civilisation, the yearly flooding of the Nile bought bounteous harvests but also harkened famine and doom when it failed. The solution? A big-ass dam to control the water flow. This was the dream of the anti-imperialist, pan-Arabist maverick President Gamal Abdel Nasser in the 1950s. But the problem was that it was expensive. Really expensive. So Nasser tried to play both the Americans and the Soviets for money and then nationalised the all-important Suez Canal to generate the necessary funds. In response, Israel, France, and the UK invaded Egypt. Boom. The Suez Crisis ensued. The invasion quickly backfired and these countries were forced to withdraw (effectively ringing the death knell for British imperial ambitions in the new world order). As for the dam’s post-construction impact? An agricultural bonanza. National wheat yields tripled in the following decades. Egypt became insulated from devastating droughts. And, at one point, it provided the country with half its electricity. But the dam also messed with the local ecosystem, displaced tens of thousands of local Nubians, and, of course, threatened numerous precious archaeological sites. A messy war. Huge numbers of displaced people. Relocated temples. Accelerated economic development. Damn, man. Pictured below: the art of jabana at a Nubian guesthouse on a cool evening in Aswan. Coffee beans roasted on hot coals, ground down with spices using a mortar and pestle, then boiled in a long-necked clay pot. Palm fibres are used to filter the brew and it’s served very hot, very black, very sweet. Just the way I like it. The Nubians. What am I remotely qualified to say about them? They are a group indigenous to Sudan and southern Egypt. Once there were even Nubian pharaohs but now they’re a people without their own nation — many of whom were forcibly displaced from their lands by the Aswan High Dam. It’s no wonder Rastafari aesthetics are so common in southern Egypt. Due to their uncertain place in the world, many Nubians have embraced the Rasta ethos of peace, harmony, and minority rights. Along with traditional coffee, we listened to Nubian music and ate coal-roasted dates. All in all, a wonderful evening. I wasn’t expecting to experience any Nubian culture during my stay in Egypt so I was delighted to glimpse even a fragment of it. My only previous exposure to anything remotely Nubian was being a cast member in the Elton John musical “Aida” (a cheesy Romeo and Juliet story with topless Egyptian warriors and sultry Nubian princesses) during high school. No, seriously. My life has just been one wild culture trip after another. Glorious praise to Ramses the Great, chosen of Ra, challenger of Hittites and punisher of Libyans! All Egypt prospers under his benevolent protection! The main attraction of travelling down to Aswan is to make it to Abu Simbel in the far southern reaches of Egypt — any further south and you’d be in Sudan! Getting to it was tough. I had to wake up before 4 am, take a three-hour-plus minibus ride there from Aswan, and then race to the ticket booth so I could see the place before it was completely swamped by other tourists. But in hindsight (and after a recovery nap or two) I believe it was worth the effort. When you think of towering pharaonic carvings and rock temples in the desert, when you think of Ozymandias with his “frown, and wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command”, you are thinking of the Great Temple of Ramses II at Abu Simbel. Four colossal statues of the king of kings flank the entrance to this 13th-century BC edifice. You see reliefs of captured foreign slaves on both sides of the entryway. There are potent, violent scenes of military conquest on the temple’s interior walls. Surely no other surviving structure of the ancient world can still project such indomitable, ferocious power. Next to the Great Temple is a smaller temple dedicated to the sky goddess Hathor and Ramses’s royal wife Nefertari. And both these buildings lie on the banks of Lake Nasser, one of the largest man-made lakes in the world, which was created by the Aswan High Dam. This leads us to an impressive fact about Abu Simbel: like the Philae Temple Complex, the entire site had to be disassembled and rebuilt on higher ground in the 1960s to save it from rising waters as a result of the dam’s construction. This project required an international team of engineers and scientist and remains perhaps the most impressive archaeological rescue mission of all time. Bloody hell, there should be a traveller's game in Egypt where you drink a shot every time you hear about the Aswan High Dam… "And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.” |
AuthorMing is an economist, traveller, and creative writer from Melbourne, Australia. He’s a nebulous collection of particles on the lookout for a good corner to sit with a book and a cup of coffee. Archives
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