No Sleep 'til Chittaurgarh

Saturday 10th May

- leaving Udaipur
- fresh train journeys
- fleapit central

there aren't any pictures today - it was the kind of day when fatigue weighted the photographer's arm, before being followed by frustration and irritation that disinclined one to take any. normal service as regards photos will be maintained in all other fully updated posts!

although not appalling in all respects, it is fair to say that the day started badly and sort of went on from there. we were hoping for a good night's sleep before our early start, but we were to have no such luck. the storm we had heard in the distance and the trembling in the ground we had felt from far off thundering inexorably crept towards Udaipur before enveloping the city or many hours. although the wind it brought was strong, its main attributes were torrential rain and violent lightning. the storm was huge, presenting sheet or forked lightning behind various individual hills, massive horizontal white cracks splitting the entire sky. power cuts are a fact of life in India - only in Jodhpur have we managed to avoid them altogether. the power had failed swiftly after the storm's onslaught, but it was only after going to the window in our rapidly heating room that we realised that the whole city had lost power. there was nothing whatsoever out of the window but a rain-lashed outline until the various lightning strands lit up the city like giant flash bulbs, the melodramatic storm of a Hammer horror film. very occasionally, the headlight of brave vehicles could be seen weakly prodding into the gloom, but otherwise it was just the lightning and the long, angry roars of aggressive thunder. sleep would have been impossible anyway, but the crack in our window had widened, ripping off our duct tape repairs and leaving a 2cm horizontal gap in the glass through which rainwater spilled in, liquid running onto Philippa's side of the bed. unsure whether the glass would hold, overheating and unable to block out the sound and light show, we stood in the windows and watched one of the largest storms we've seen anywhere for a long time. we have no idea when we finally deemed it safe to try and sleep once more, but it was several hours later until the storm - still at full strength - ground is way over the surrounding hills and finally into the distance, with a couple of ear-splitting and close lightning cracks as an authoritative goodbye. in the end, we may have got two hours sleep before the alarm for our departure to the station sounded.

the storm had raised the level of water in the lake a little so that it almost crossed the section running underneath our daily footbridge. all of the buildings still looked grey and wet. we left the Panorama for the last time into a really fresh morning, with the air cool and clean, as if the storm had scrubbed the sky. crossing the footbridge for the last time, the view of the palace complex still impressed as it had the first time we had seen it. although it had only just gone 6am, we managed to find a rickshaw to take us to the station a distant four of five kilometres away. the rickshaw we chose was struggling rather a lot and the driver had to stop a few times to twiddle with the engine (located under his seat), like your dad fiddling his with petrol lawnmower at the weekend to get it to work. there were large pools of standing water in the roads, an odd sight on our trip so far!

early at the station, we tried to find out where to go for our train, but the enquiries desk was not much help and - from his embarrassed reaction when we showed him our booking form - didn't seem to be able to read. the electronic platform signs weren't displaying any numbers either. through a mixture of guesswork, deduction and questions, we got the platform right. we spoke to a very serious little boy who was practising his first rate English, urged on by proud parents. our train arrived with the added bonus of a side destination panel in English and even a visible carriage number, which was a nice change. for this short journey we were in basic second class seated, the second lowest tariff band. some of the trains that we had seen had been heaving in that class, but in the early morning our carriage was busy with middle class families, polite and briefly chatty. we pulled away on time and off once more, destination Chittaurgarh, also known as Chittor.

the overnight storm must have been extensive, for most of the landscape on the two hour journey was soaked or showing lush green foliage or rich brown earth. another train ride brought forth another landscape, this one studded with small rocky hillocks and carpeted with low level partitioned fields, many of which appeared well irrigated, even with the rain of the previous night. there were extensive living fences entirely constructed from large, carefully grown walls of cacti that must have been very old, as some were white at the base and only green for their top half. as the morning went on, one might have expected the carriage to heat up, but it was still so fresh that most of the ceiling fans remained switched off. perhaps we were in a good car, but the storm seemed to have lifted spirits and brows; even though we were both well and truly shattered, the fresh scenery and light wind acted as a balm.

brief but enjoyable, the journey ended on our arrival at Chittaurgarh station just after 9am. the approach leads you past the fort at a distance of a few kilometres. a long, rocky escarpment rises from the flat plain and its only when you look at it closely that you realise its entire length is castellated. 5km long and 1km wide, Chittaurgarh Fort has an especially grim and death-filled history and was the original local mahawaran capital before the foundation of Udaipur. it does not have the sheer height and impact of Jodhpur's Mehrangarh Fort, but it still looks nigh on impregnable. yet the fort was conquered not once but three times and is now mostly in impressive and very extensive ruins, rather than preserved for posterity. it looked like a very atmospheric place to explore, just as soon as we got some sleep.

we stumbled a few hundred metres from the station to the Meera Hotel, which we had repeatedly tried and failed to telephone from Udaipur. the main road on which it and the station and situated was very busy and noisy, constantly full of trucks and the almost continuous blast of their long, loud and polyphonic horns. many other parked alongside lined our path.

touted as the best budget option in town by our guidebook in what it warned was not a great town in which to stay, the Meera appears on first inspection to be the sort of place that you might hole up in when on the run from the police. subsequent inspections indicated that you probably didn't want to inspect anything further too closely. although we had no booking when we arrived in Chittor, the Meera had rooms spare - many rooms, in fact - but the manager seemed disinterested in serving us or whether or not we stayed, save for boasting about his new restaurant and bar. we were shown their cheapest couple's room and an AC one - we had no intention of paying their prices, which were elevated far above the condition or state of the rooms, as we had read was common in the town. we tiredly and resignedly decided to take the cheapest room, as it was only for two nights. dirty and grubby, we deduced that the linen had never been cleaned, while the walls looked as if many insects had met their deaths against their greying surfaces. the towel we received for the room was no larger than a flannel, and we had to ask for a second. although an interior room, it backed on to a small central atrium with a large, non-functional fountain at the bottom, the sole purpose of which seemed to be to collect water from mysterious roof-level pipes and breed mosquitoes. the atrium also acted as an amplifier for the never ending blare of truck horns and the noisy bangings of the hotel's apparently limitless numbers of staff, most of who were employed to clatter cutlery around in large amounts, as far as we could make out. the squat toilet was no hardship, but the room as a whole was an armpit and no mistake. but it had a firm bed in it and we were dog tired.

save for Philippa having a brief half hour out to call home and buy some crisps, we stunned ourselves by sleeping right through from around 10am until the late afternoon, essentially the whole practical day. it was when we woke up that our problems started. the toilet revealed itself to be evidently and quite graphically blocked, a fact that we found difficult to convey to the guy on the desk and the young lad they sent up to deal with it, since almost no-one in the hotel spoke any English and our Hindi was coming up short. the attempts of the young boy to solve the problem were genuine but only served to exacerbate it. he then disappeared, and then nothing happened until we went downstairs to ask at reception again. no less than three different men then came unbidden into our room and looked at the toilet from a distance before saying we would need to move rooms, with a perceptible hint of 'has this old problem still not been sorted?' we were then shown to a room that was slightly less soiled with a broken television. we didn't care about the TV and we were already angry that the limitless staff had picked up some of our belongings without asking and moved them to the new room, taking great delight in pointing out and then patting Edd's neck wallet as they did so. however, as far as the staff were concerned, no TV necessitated another room change and we were shown still two more rooms, down musty corridors filed with broken furniture and the carcasses of dead vending machines, one of which was squalid and the other of which had a balcony overlooking a yard full of plastic bottles and old wood, with a small fire burning acridly below. it took some effort, but we eventually persuaded them that we would take the no-TV room. it looked like it might once have been cleaned this century and, even though its air cooler system had a two inch gap around its edge leading into the central atrium, it was better overall in relative terms and even had a Western toilet. we couldn't understand why they hadn't shown it to us before.

eventually settling again and resting a little, we braved their restaurant. the money not spent anywhere else in the hotel had been spent here, if not wisely - of all of the fittings, we only really liked the lights. we were the first people in, but there was a reserved table scattered with rose petals for a large, well-dressed group. the restaurant seemed to be a destination in its own right, a fact that we found both hilarious and unfathomable. the staff were again numerous, bizarre in their approach to service and strangers to deodorant all, but the food was well priced and tasty, even if there did seem to be an obsession with dowsing everything in pepper. even our lime sodas contained pepper, a fact that we could not understand at all. we ate well and scampered back upstairs to our hovel before the hotel just became too weird to handle. tomorrow we would take on the Fort, but tonight we just wanted to somehow drown out the world's noisiest road and the accompanying crockery orchestra tuning up below.

best

edd & philippa