Many weddings, and a touch of the Karma Sutra...
From Orchha to Khajuraho, designated a world heritage site on the grounds of its ancient Hindu and Jain temples inlaid with amazingly intricate carvings depicting the culture and life of the period. The site is famed in the main for the so-called "erotic" carvings featuring - ahem - positions drawn from the Karma Sutra. In truth these comprise only a fairly small minority of the overall number, but what there are certainly leave very little indeed to anyone's imagination. Just as interesting albeit in a rather different way are some of the other carvings showing men and women of the time going about their everyday and sometimes not-so-everyday lives. Our guide showing us round pointed out several carvings that seemed to eerily pre-date our modern times and style of dress, particularly in some of the carvings depicting women of the period. Tattoos I guess we might have expected, but we were also shown what looked oddly like someone carrying a handbag and another wearing a rucksack, whilst another (and this was perhaps a little fanciful) appeared to be doing something on a laptop - or maybe a tablet...
Being a world heritage site, Khajuraho is unsurprisingly far more geared towards tourism than Orchha,and this is reflected in the vast (relative to the small size of the town itself) number of relatively swanky hotels lining the road leading into the town. However we learn from our tour guide and the guy at the restaurant we eat at later that of late business on the tourism front has not been good. Reasons for this include poor infrastructure - the road in from Orchha is bad, the one out to Varanasi apparently worse. The situation though has been made worse by the recent escalation in the proxy war being fought between Trump and the Iranian regime, and in particular the recent shooting down of the Ukrainian airliner. The restaurant guy told us about his brother's hotel in a nearby town where hundreds of bookings - mostly of american tourists - have recently been cancelled. In a region where tourism is the lifeblood, this is bad news indeed, and another example of how the casualties - literal and economic - of all this belligerence spreads well beyond the more obvious boundaries.
For the immediate moment however the hotels at least can make hay with hosting weddings. We are currently in the midst of the marriage season - a window in the year when, by tradition - Indian daddies are expected to dig very deep indeed into their pockets to marry their daughters off to their beaus via hugely extravagant and massively expensive wedding ceremonies. One such ceremony is due to be taking place in the hotel we are staying at. Lucky us, you might say - privileged to be able to see at close hand the elaborate preparations, the lavish costumes, the exuberant celebrations lasting long into the night. True, all true. But the downside lies in the last bit - long into the night. Already tired after a lot of travelling and more to come next day, we enquired of the hotel staff whether maybe there might just possibly be a little bit of a problem with noise. Oh no, they told us, no problem, in your room you won't hear a thing.
Well. At around six that evening we hear the huge PA system outside our window start to crank up, and by 6.30 the noise is so loud the windows of our room are shaking in our frames. By the time we get back from dinner they're at it in earnest - although most of the guests seem to be milling around the hotel, ignoring the music blaring out in the grounds. Don't worry, the young woman behind reception assures us, it will definitely finish by 11 pm. You can probably guess the next bit, so I suppose in the end we were lucky to get away with the music finally going off around 12.30, leaving us finally able to slip into some kind of heavily-earplugged sleep...
Being a world heritage site, Khajuraho is unsurprisingly far more geared towards tourism than Orchha,and this is reflected in the vast (relative to the small size of the town itself) number of relatively swanky hotels lining the road leading into the town. However we learn from our tour guide and the guy at the restaurant we eat at later that of late business on the tourism front has not been good. Reasons for this include poor infrastructure - the road in from Orchha is bad, the one out to Varanasi apparently worse. The situation though has been made worse by the recent escalation in the proxy war being fought between Trump and the Iranian regime, and in particular the recent shooting down of the Ukrainian airliner. The restaurant guy told us about his brother's hotel in a nearby town where hundreds of bookings - mostly of american tourists - have recently been cancelled. In a region where tourism is the lifeblood, this is bad news indeed, and another example of how the casualties - literal and economic - of all this belligerence spreads well beyond the more obvious boundaries.
For the immediate moment however the hotels at least can make hay with hosting weddings. We are currently in the midst of the marriage season - a window in the year when, by tradition - Indian daddies are expected to dig very deep indeed into their pockets to marry their daughters off to their beaus via hugely extravagant and massively expensive wedding ceremonies. One such ceremony is due to be taking place in the hotel we are staying at. Lucky us, you might say - privileged to be able to see at close hand the elaborate preparations, the lavish costumes, the exuberant celebrations lasting long into the night. True, all true. But the downside lies in the last bit - long into the night. Already tired after a lot of travelling and more to come next day, we enquired of the hotel staff whether maybe there might just possibly be a little bit of a problem with noise. Oh no, they told us, no problem, in your room you won't hear a thing.
Well. At around six that evening we hear the huge PA system outside our window start to crank up, and by 6.30 the noise is so loud the windows of our room are shaking in our frames. By the time we get back from dinner they're at it in earnest - although most of the guests seem to be milling around the hotel, ignoring the music blaring out in the grounds. Don't worry, the young woman behind reception assures us, it will definitely finish by 11 pm. You can probably guess the next bit, so I suppose in the end we were lucky to get away with the music finally going off around 12.30, leaving us finally able to slip into some kind of heavily-earplugged sleep...
Comments
Post a Comment