The temples that tourism forgot
We travel east from Agra to the town of Jhansi courtesy of Indian Railways - a scheduled journey time of just under three hours. There was a time not so way back when any rail journey in India - even a relatively short one - would surely offer rich pickings for any blogger of a satirical bent. But no longer, it seems. Yes, the train from Delhi arrives late (but not that late) and by the time we get to Jhansi its even later, but still only by about thirty minutes or so. We board the train, find our seats, which are where they should be, and a couple of minutes later the train quietly pulls out, no fuss, no bother. We're travelling second class, in company with a carriage-full of passengers drawn mostly from India's broad middle class - not so poor, not so rich, just middling. The airline-style seating a bit worn but plenty comfortable, the efficient (and complimentary) food and drink service welcome - even if we didn't try the food - and the train speedy(ish), zipping along at a respectable canter, no serious delays, no cows or massed weddings to delay us on the line. The only thing that really stands out (and not in such a good way) is the weather - grey and wet, all too reminiscent of the stuff we hoped we'd left behind. We disembark at Jhansi, and the train carries on towards its terminal stop in the town of Bhopal, a place with name that still casts a long shadow, across India and beyond...
Its half an hour by car from Jhansi to our next stopover in Orchha, where we have two nights and no guide. The town is small, and weirdly quiet by recent standards - a place where you can walk the streets rubbing shoulders with the placidly meandering dogs, pigs and cattle, reasonably confident of not being mown down by the next kamikaze motorist. Even the expected hassle from the stallholders and vendors feels muted by comparison with Jaipur or Delhi. Getting away from it all might be an exaggeration - or even an outright lie - but it certainly is a change of gear.
Not that much of a deal is made of Orchha in our tour info, and as mentioned before, we have no guided excursions in the plan. The main deal - indeed, the only deal - in this small place are the scattering of palaces and chattris (monumental mausoleums) that surround the time. So we were hoping (a) that the weather would improve a bit and (b) that we'd find enough to pass our one full day here.
Well, score one on the weather- the skies clear to our best day of the trip so far, sunny and pleasantly warm. And score two on Orchha too - turns out it's drop dead amazing, and a bit of mystery too. The scattering of palaces etc actually amounts to a total of some 30 separate buildings dating from the 16th and 17th centuries, all of which you can visit on foot, most of which you can enter and walk around without restriction, other than a nominal fee payable on entrance to the main palace, the Jehangir Mehal. Although the sites, and the opportunity to visit, are mentioned in our borrowed 2001 Lonely Planet guide, there is no obvious sign of anywhere having been much developed for tourism purposes, or indeed of many tourists visiting. Which is astonishing, because the sites themselves are astonishing themselves. Inside the Jehangir, provided you are careful on your feet (no health and safety here) you can explore at will, climbing the steep narrow stone-carved stairways through three separate floors, discovering hidden chambers and wandering through long galleried hallways, while the other pick of the bunch, the Raj Mahal, reveals murals of staggering beauty, untouched and unrestored through hundreds of years. As a comparator, the closest fit we could think of were the temples at Angor Wat in Cambodia (yes, really) - better by far than the Red Fort in Agra or the Amber Fort in Jaipur. It feels like we've caught the sights of Orchha at a particular moment in time - there are visible signs of work getting under way to make the place more amenable to mass tourism - monuments being spruced up, infrastructure being improved - and when that time come, the masses will surely come too. We feel lucky to have been able to visit when we did.
Its half an hour by car from Jhansi to our next stopover in Orchha, where we have two nights and no guide. The town is small, and weirdly quiet by recent standards - a place where you can walk the streets rubbing shoulders with the placidly meandering dogs, pigs and cattle, reasonably confident of not being mown down by the next kamikaze motorist. Even the expected hassle from the stallholders and vendors feels muted by comparison with Jaipur or Delhi. Getting away from it all might be an exaggeration - or even an outright lie - but it certainly is a change of gear.
Not that much of a deal is made of Orchha in our tour info, and as mentioned before, we have no guided excursions in the plan. The main deal - indeed, the only deal - in this small place are the scattering of palaces and chattris (monumental mausoleums) that surround the time. So we were hoping (a) that the weather would improve a bit and (b) that we'd find enough to pass our one full day here.
Well, score one on the weather- the skies clear to our best day of the trip so far, sunny and pleasantly warm. And score two on Orchha too - turns out it's drop dead amazing, and a bit of mystery too. The scattering of palaces etc actually amounts to a total of some 30 separate buildings dating from the 16th and 17th centuries, all of which you can visit on foot, most of which you can enter and walk around without restriction, other than a nominal fee payable on entrance to the main palace, the Jehangir Mehal. Although the sites, and the opportunity to visit, are mentioned in our borrowed 2001 Lonely Planet guide, there is no obvious sign of anywhere having been much developed for tourism purposes, or indeed of many tourists visiting. Which is astonishing, because the sites themselves are astonishing themselves. Inside the Jehangir, provided you are careful on your feet (no health and safety here) you can explore at will, climbing the steep narrow stone-carved stairways through three separate floors, discovering hidden chambers and wandering through long galleried hallways, while the other pick of the bunch, the Raj Mahal, reveals murals of staggering beauty, untouched and unrestored through hundreds of years. As a comparator, the closest fit we could think of were the temples at Angor Wat in Cambodia (yes, really) - better by far than the Red Fort in Agra or the Amber Fort in Jaipur. It feels like we've caught the sights of Orchha at a particular moment in time - there are visible signs of work getting under way to make the place more amenable to mass tourism - monuments being spruced up, infrastructure being improved - and when that time come, the masses will surely come too. We feel lucky to have been able to visit when we did.
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