Long before I set foot in India back in mid-August, I knew I wanted to go to Rajasthan. Rajasthan is a state north of Maharashtra (the state Mumbai and Pune are in) that is known for its extravagant palaces and temples. Extravagant anything usually isn't my sort of thing, but, after doing a little research, I learned that Rajasthan has some pretty incredible history, is mostly desert, and is home to some of most beautiful and dynamic cities in all of India. I was especially pulled toward Udaipur, which is known as the most romantic city in India, Jodphur, which is known for being predominantly blue in color, and Jaisalmer, which is a mere sixty kilometers from the Pakistan border and is a true desert civilization. Jodhpur and Jaisalmer are less touristy and less well-known than other big cities in Rajasthan, and I'm always interested in traveling off the beaten path.
This is where things got interesting. In the chaos of the last few weeks of the semester, I didn't get much time to actually plan this part of my trip. My vision was doing some sort of backpacking adventure type thing across Rajasthan, which is a whimsical, exciting, and also super unrealistic thing to do if you're a woman traveling alone. I thought that having my Mom with me would help make this less unrealistic (for reference, she's into that sort of thing - she went backpacking in Nepal just last year), but it really didn't. Without a group or a leader, it is really difficult to do stuff like homestays, eat at roadside, thirty-rupee (fifty cents) stands for dinner, and see the real India. Since I had been seeing the real India (or, part of it, anyway) so far during my time here, I thought, in a somewhat elitist way, I now admit, that it would be easy to do this Rajasthan trip in a similar way. I was picturing cute inns with dinner cooked in the wood stove using cow manure as fuel and riding camels out into the desert at sunset, cooking dinner over a roaring fire, and sleeping under the stars.
After spending an entire day in a tiny travel agent's office, it was clear that this wasn't going to be my reality. This particular travel agent was set on, as I interpreted it, keeping the vision of India in the eyes of American tourists as flawless as possible. He wanted us to stay at high-end hotels that didn't let you see much of India at all. Though obviously it wasn't up to him how we planned this trip, it kind of - in a weird, twisted way - scared me into thinking that I didn't know this country at all and that if I was planning to live through this, I better listen to this guy. Just because it's not true, doesn't mean it's not effective. And of course, my Mom was staying on the safe side even though that isn't what she'd normally do either, because she was now in a foreign country with her daughter and a whole lot of responsibility.
Before I knew it, our trip was planned. There wasn't much room for spontaneity. We even had a driver, for crying out loud. I forced the travel agent to leave just one night open in Jaisalmer - with no hotel booked, no nothing, so that I could plan something off the beaten path.
It was a long day of arguing and I had to take responsibility for the fact that had I wanted this trip to be different, it would have had to be a whole different arrangement of truths.
This is where things got interesting. In the chaos of the last few weeks of the semester, I didn't get much time to actually plan this part of my trip. My vision was doing some sort of backpacking adventure type thing across Rajasthan, which is a whimsical, exciting, and also super unrealistic thing to do if you're a woman traveling alone. I thought that having my Mom with me would help make this less unrealistic (for reference, she's into that sort of thing - she went backpacking in Nepal just last year), but it really didn't. Without a group or a leader, it is really difficult to do stuff like homestays, eat at roadside, thirty-rupee (fifty cents) stands for dinner, and see the real India. Since I had been seeing the real India (or, part of it, anyway) so far during my time here, I thought, in a somewhat elitist way, I now admit, that it would be easy to do this Rajasthan trip in a similar way. I was picturing cute inns with dinner cooked in the wood stove using cow manure as fuel and riding camels out into the desert at sunset, cooking dinner over a roaring fire, and sleeping under the stars.
After spending an entire day in a tiny travel agent's office, it was clear that this wasn't going to be my reality. This particular travel agent was set on, as I interpreted it, keeping the vision of India in the eyes of American tourists as flawless as possible. He wanted us to stay at high-end hotels that didn't let you see much of India at all. Though obviously it wasn't up to him how we planned this trip, it kind of - in a weird, twisted way - scared me into thinking that I didn't know this country at all and that if I was planning to live through this, I better listen to this guy. Just because it's not true, doesn't mean it's not effective. And of course, my Mom was staying on the safe side even though that isn't what she'd normally do either, because she was now in a foreign country with her daughter and a whole lot of responsibility.
Before I knew it, our trip was planned. There wasn't much room for spontaneity. We even had a driver, for crying out loud. I forced the travel agent to leave just one night open in Jaisalmer - with no hotel booked, no nothing, so that I could plan something off the beaten path.
It was a long day of arguing and I had to take responsibility for the fact that had I wanted this trip to be different, it would have had to be a whole different arrangement of truths.
