Best Western's Travel Blog - You Must Be Trippin'

Undiscovered India

April 1 2009 by Mike Mason
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I mentioned in a post last week how tourism interest in Mumbai, India has spiked with the recent interest in Oscar winner Slum Dog Millionaire. India is a big place with lots to see. You probably have heard of the Taj Mahal or the Ganges...but there are lots of fascinating, less discovered spots. My brother spent a fair amount of time in India and shared some insight into a few of the amazing, less discovered, places.

I recall my first trip to India, a short fifteen years ago. I remember stuffing stacks of travelers' checks and US currency into concealed pockets in my luggage and my pants. I remember sitting at banks for four or five hours to get cash advances charged to my credit card. Computers hadn't arrived, then, and Indian banks were still using accountants and ledgers. I remember discovering by missing a bus that Hindi uses the same word for "tomorrow" and "yesterday". That India barely exists anymore. Nowadays, there are globally linked ATMs in every Indian city, so there's no need to take travelers' checks, no need to spend half a day in a bank, and no need to use a credit card to get cash injections. Even in Vrindavan, a tiny town, well off the typical tourist track, you can now go to an ATM machine and withdraw cash in Indian currency directly from your own checking account. You might still misunderstand your booking agent and miss a bus, but you'll be able to buy a ticket for the next bus without any trouble.

So, you should go. Traveling in today's India is a breeze, and some of the most extraordinary and interesting things on the planet are there. Of course, India is a big, big place, and the cultural and geographic differences between north and south, east and west, make it seem even bigger. Another traveling advantage of today's India is a booming domestic airlines industry that makes it possible to fly within in India for absurd prices in comparison with flying costs in the U.S. So, you can see Mumbai, Delhi, Calcutta, and Chennai in a whirlwind tour. But there's still a good quality-vs-quantity argument for focusing your excursion on a limited geographic area.

One of the traditional tracks is Delhi-Agra-Jaipur. These urban centers are only a few hours from each other by car, bus, or train, and many of India's most recognizable and impressive sites lie within the triangle they form, including the Taj Mahal, the Lal Qila, and the Hawa Mahal. And you should, certainly, see those things. But there are hundreds of other stunning, remarkable, and perplexing things in the triangle that the typical tourist programs miss. Perhaps nothing quite rivals the Taj, but here are five things to see between Delhi, Agra, and Jaipur that you'll spend more time talking about once you get back.

Itmad ud Daulah (Agra): Sometimes described as a "prototype" of the Taj, this tomb-monument is an exemplary model of Mughal architecture. The grounds were laid out with the remarkable symmetry that characterize earlier tomb-monuments like Humayun's tomb in Delhi, and much of the monument was built with the same perfectly-cut, red sandstone as the tombs and palaces and towers the Mughal emperors constructed all around Delhi. But the center-piece of the site is the white marble mausoleum of Mirza Ghiyas Beg, an advisor to the Mughal emperor Jahangir. It's a relatively small building, in comparison with other grand monuments in the area, but there's something profound and exquisite about its modesty. The craftsmen who shaped the mausoleum paid very close attention to every inch, and the precision involved in the decorative settings of semi-precious stones in the marble walls--nearly baroque visions of trees and flowers--surpasses anything the most expensive modern electric dremels could do. Sunlight enters the tomb area through jalis. From only a few steps away, these windows seem to be covered with modern screening material, as if to keep the bugs out, but the screens are original to the building and, like the rest of the monument, are carved from marble. What produced the Taj Mahal a generation later were the designs and techniques developed in constructing the Itmad ud Daulah. And while you'll be part of a large, jostling crowd when you visit the Taj, the chances are that you'll be alone with the breeze at its predecessor.

Krishna Janmbhoomi (Mathura): About halfway between Delhi and Agra is the cramped, industrial city of Mathura. It's not a particularly comfortable city, but for the intrepid it's worth a stop because it's a very important place for many Hindus. From the national highway you can see a tall, Hindu temple rising out of the jumble of modern Mathura, which marks the birthplace of the Hindu deity Krishna. Once you get through security (which is tight) you find that the temple itself is only part of a large complex dedicated to this happy god, worshipped almost exclusively in the form of a naughty, naughty boy. Among the additional sites in the complex is the solemn, underground room in which Krishna was born, and the less solemn gallery of animatronics illustrating the central stories of Krishna's life. If you go in late August, you'll be able to celebrate Krishna's birthday at the site of his birth--a crowded, hot, unbearably loud party you won't soon forget. And there are good accommodations to be had in Mathura, in spite of how the town looks from the highway. My family and I once enjoyed a sunny and warm Thanksgiving dinner on the Best Western Radha Ashok hotel's lovely lawn.

Jantar Mantar (Jaipur and Delhi): There are a few of these around India, but the best two are in Jaipur and Delhi. Built in the eighteenth century by Sawai Jai Singh--a Rajput prince and mathematical prodigy whose Mughal title "Sawai" means that he was one quarter more special than other people--the pristine brick and plaster forms of soaring staircases, tilted platforms, and enormous, upended wheels look like the pieces of a really imaginative skate park, but turn out to be super-sized instruments for astronomical observation. The various devices keep track of everything the stars, planets, the sun, and the moon do, and are precisely constructed. The combination of extraordinarily meticulous science and aesthetic whimsy implant Jantar Mantar complexes uniquely on the memory.

Keoladeo National Park (Bharatpur): Between Jaipur and Agra lies Bharatpur, an otherwise nondescript Indian town except for being the access to one of the greatest bird sanctuaries in Asia. The park was recovered from an artificially constructed floodplain that, a century ago, provided hunting grounds for Indian royalty. The floodplain still exists, and the birds still gather, but you can't shoot them with anything but a camera. And the best wildlife photographers in the world come to Bharatpur to shoot. On a cold morning in the winter or spring one fairly stumbles over birds of the most exotic sort, including a couple of very rare Siberian Cranes that still winter here. And you'll not only see cranes, brahmani ducks, coots, and pochards. One of our guides took us off the beaten path to within a few steps of a snake the size of The Orient Express.

The Sulabh Toilet Museum (Delhi): For the sheer quirkiness of it, you have to leave the well-trod areas of Delhi to see this homage to human waste disposal. But the Sulabh museum is not simply an oddity, it's also an arm of a truly visionary humanitarian project. India, for all its recent modernization, still faces a seemingly insurmountable pile of refuse. Sulabh International has undertaken a number of projects to deal with some of that refuse, and also to improve the lives of the people in India often tasked with cleaning up after others. Adjacent to the museum is a K-12 school for children born into India "scavenger" families. The museum enshrines a variety of historical devices--mostly European--for moving human waste away from the bodies that eject it, including a portable French toilet that looks like a bookcase and a replica of Louis XIII's very own throne. The microwave-incinerator toilet is my favorite. The museum is housed on the grounds of a complex dedicated to a variety of proof-of-concept projects. Sulabh's real contribution to India is on display here in the form of several different kinds of easy-to-build and very cheap latrines, most of which use very little water and a dual-septic system which can dry human waste into perfectly sanitary nuggets that then can be used as fuel. Brilliant. The museum curator proudly declares that the electricity to all the buildings on the site comes from devices powered by human waste, and he'll show you the kitchen, the gas stove of which burns you-know-what. They even have an impressive public latrine, streetside. Be sure to leave something in the latrine when you leave the museum. It'll be put to good use.