October 24th, 2019
There is a popular route called the Golden Triangle that covers several of the highlights through Rajasthan. It starts by going to Agra where the Taj Mahal is. This was our plan until we realized the Taj is closed on Fridays. Since we have limited days here in India we didn’t want to wait around for a day so we decided to do the triangle starting from the other direction. I wanted to take a train or bus to Jodhpur which is known as the “blue city”. Everyone we talked to told us something different as far as how to get there. Brendan and I both tried unsuccessfully to register online for the government train site and for the bus site. By the time we got to the end of the registration we would get an error code so we could never actually buy tickets. We found out later it was because an Indian SIM card was needed to be able to use these. Another lady in our hostel told us we needed to go down to the tourist bureau office at the railway station and get the tickets there. Using the metro was the best way to get there so we got ready and figured we would swing by there and get our tickets for an overnight train tonight. We then would have the rest of the day to explore Delhi using the metro.
Well this simple plan turned out to be the most complicated thing that literally usurped our whole day. We first figured out the metro, which I love to do in new cities as it feels like such a nice accomplishment. They all seem to be pretty similar and easy once you get past the initial confusion on what type of card system they use. I have to say, the metro is the most useful and functioning transportation system in this city. It gets you off of the roads with the mass traffic and the never-ending car horns. It is for sure the best way to get around.
It still took us about 1.5 hours to get to the tourist bureau office so we could get our train ticket. Locals have a completely different way of getting their tickets and I could not believe the process for tourists. The tourist bureau is like the DMV. You have to go in and take a ticket. Then you fill out a paper application with the information of the train you want which I had to previously look up on their website that doesn’t really work.
After another hour of sitting in this office waiting for our number to be called it was finally our turn. She took our application, looked up the train and said this train now only has one seat available. So that was not going to work. She said we would need to wait in another super long line to figure out a different train option and once we had that, take a new ticket and wait in this line again. Oh, and she would not issue us a ticket without our original passport even though we had photos and copies of it. Of course, there are no signs anywhere that say, “Make sure before you wait here, you have your passport to go to the next city within this same state”. Not wanting to spend another three hours roundtrip on the metro to go get our passports and wait in another two lines for a train that maybe has open seats, I just said forget it… and left totally defeated.
India has to have more IT people than anywhere in the world since all the tech support is outsourced here. Every local we meet that isn’t in tourism is an IT person. It just shocks me this is their system to get a simple train ticket. Seems absolutely unreal. We got back to our hostel and extremely frustrated about wasting our entire day and still not having any transportation out of the city. I told one of the workers that he needed to help us book something. He did… for a fee of course. Since it was so late in the day all the bus seats to Jodhpur were now filled for the overnight sleeper buses. We changed our plans and decided to get a bus to Jaipur (known as the “pink city”) in the morning.
We’ve been travelling around the world for a while now and I like to think we are somewhat savvy about how to get around. We have always managed to figure it out no matter what country or what mode of transportation we needed. I don’t know what I was doing was wrong, but I seemed pretty darn inept at figuring it out in India. I think that is why packaged tours in this area are so popular. India is generally very inexpensive, but these tours are very expensive and I suspect it is because they know it is extremely complicated trying to do it on your own, and many people will try to scam you.
With the help of the hostel and paying an extra “booking fee” we had a bus for the morning. The sun was going down so we only had a little time to see any sites. We took the metro and went to Lotus Temple. This temple was built in 1986. In 2001, CNN released a report saying it was the most visited building in the world! I know that was a long time ago but found it hard to believe. I had never heard of it. According to the government, it had attracted over 100 million visitors by 2014. Parts of it looked very similar to the Sydney Opera House.
It was free to go into and it is a temple for a “new” religion called Bahai. This religion believes in the unity of all religions and anyone can enter the temple for silent prayer. You take your shoes off and wait in line as they only let a certain amount of people in the temple at once. This is the FIRST time in all of Asia there was a successful line formed. For four months, Brendan and I have been pushed and shoved and cut in front of. There is no consciousness about any personal space here. Unless you are body checking the person in front of you, someone will walk right up and squeeze in front of you. It has been comical and frustrating because in our culture we can’t imagine being that way. We have been forced to use elbows and stand our ground or else we would literally never get our turn to use the bathroom! This is really no exaggeration and for anyone who has been to this part of the world I am sure you can understand.
So, every Indian person kept trying to go up to the front of the line only to be told by the temple attendants they need to go back to their place and wait their turn. It was so funny watching this because no one could understand. The locals would start arguing with the line attendants saying they really need to go to the front but they would just politely be told to go back to their place and wait their turn. This gave me a tremendous amount of personal satisfaction deep in my soul. The locals would reluctantly go back to their place but still couldn’t stand still. They were constantly scanning, looking for ways to get around the line attendant so they could cut in front of a few more people.
I understand this is a cultural difference and where I come from, line cutting is something we would consider very rude, but not here. I try to understand and have been forced to embrace it or else I would never get a turn in a bathroom, or at a cash register or whatever. It personally makes me uncomfortable having to use physical force with people just in order to stand my ground and get my turn in line. So anyway, when I saw that this was the first line actually being enforced, it made me extremely happy thinking maybe I could get on board with this new religion…I certainly like the way they handle a line!
After the temple we got some dinner and went back to the hostel to get ready for our early morning bus ride to Jaipur.