After 2 days, four airports, and three flights sitting next to the same child screaming “Yogabagaba”, I was more than ready to get to a hostel and sleep for days. We waited until 730 am to leave the airport so that it would be light enough to make our way around, but the city was so gray with either pollution or fog that it made little difference. We found a cab directed him to a road that was supposedly loaded with touristy, cheap hostels, plenty of restaurants and small bazaars. As I jumped out of the cab, I found myself very mistaken.
I’d rather not be presumptuous, but the location I had arrived at appeared to be a ghetto, and if it was not a ghetto, it surely had all the symptoms of one. If there were shops and restaraunts, they had been borded up and closed down long before my arrival, and the homeless percentage exceeded 50% of the people on the block. My cab driver looked at me, and in broken english said, ” This place is bad, very bad, its no good to come here in the morning or at night”. It was 9 am.
I got back in the cab and asked him to take me to any good restaraunt or hostel or even anywhere safe. He took me to a tourist office. I had read dozens of time to absolutly never let a cab driver take you to an office you dont request to, because they get commision and will overcharge you terribly. But frightended, confused, and exhausted I was at their mercey.
Our conversation went like this:
“Hi I’d like to find a hostel for the night”
“There are no hostels available in the city, everything is booked, but maybe I could get you into a hotel for about 200 dollars a night”
(I had looked at open hostels about 4 hours prior and knew there were availabilities)
“Okay, well then how about a train to Japuir”
“Trains are booked until Christmas, but how about you hire a driver for 1000 dollars you can have a driver for 10 days, see all of Rajasthan”
“Oh well, I’d like to take my time…”
“You won’t need any more time, I know tourist things, and they all only need a day in each city”
I went to leave at this point, but James stayed firmly put. I took the hint, sat back down, and began examining the map with a new intensity. “Okay how about hiring a car to just Jaipur?”
“That will be 125 each, but you should really just go with my plan for only a few hundred more, it makes much more sense”
We both interjected an at first polite “no” to a more nerved “no” and finally an “absolutely not” until he finally stopped. By the time money had switched hands, the driver was already there, grinning.
I spent most of the six hour drive alert, watching. Outside I watched men in Hindi garb heard sheep and goats down the road, elephants with painted faces, wandering cows, tent cities, children beggars, and monkeys hanging from walls, fields of saffron, beautiful women in brightly colored saris and hundreds of crumbling temples. As we drove through crumbling slums I panicked as to whether I’d chosen the right destination. Should we buy plane tickets to Sri Lanka? Maybe brave the winter in the Himalayas and go to the farm? When we came to stop for lunch, (samosas and chai), I expressed my doubts. James took me to the edge of the restaurants garden and had I peak out. Ahead were an endless field of yellow flower and a family having a picnic? They waved, we waved back. “We have to handle the bumps in the road with grace” he said.
Our cab driver, to say the least, was a personality. He spoke nearly no English but talked to us the entire time, excluding the moments he spent yelling in Hindi on his cell phone. He stopped the car several times to give us advice on India, which then resulted with taking us to a shop or restaurant his friends owned. For instance, when he told me to stay safe I must change into a Sari, three blocks later we were at fabric factory that a friend of his owned. When we finally arrived to Japuir six hours later, he handed us a card with his number, made one last speech about how he would drive us all around India for fractions of what his tour company would charge us. I nodded, thankful just to have made it to a place I could finally sleep, it had been 3 days.
Little Drifter 