Travelling around India requires fortitude. Tourists are badgered from the moment they step out of a taxi, hotel, train, or restaurant. The locals will try to sell you plastic Buddhas, battered brassware, prayer beads, postcards, pirated DVDs and priestly blessings.
Window-shopping down Colaba Causeway in Mumbai is impossible! The moment you allow your eyes to turn slightly in the direction of a shop window, the owner will grab you by the arm and steer you in.
"Looking is free!" he will assure you but, once inside the shop, it will be impossible to get out without buying something.
In Bundi however, it is possible to walk around town all day without being harassed, providing an excellent opportunity to see how the locals live from day to day.
We discovered Bundi by chance. We had spent a few days in Udaipur celebrating the colourful Holi Festival and admiring the famous lakes, which had unfortunately been turned into pastures by the drought.
It was time to leave the lake- grazing camels and elephants behind and make our way to Mumbai to catch the plane home. As there is no direct rail link between Udaipur and Mumbai, we needed to catch a taxi to Kota, a large industrial town on the main Delhi-Mumbai line. Rather than visit another big city, we decided to overnight in Bundi instead. Bundi, about 40km north-west of Kota, is a compact town of Brahmin-blue houses, surrounded by the Aravelli Hills and criss-crossed by narrow alleyways. When Bundi was replaced as capital of the Hada Rajput Kingdom by Kota, it slipped into being a quiet backwater with a relaxed atmosphere, ideal for visiting at an unhurried pace.
The buildings are decorated with ornate balconies. Children's faces peer out of tiny overhead windows, framed by delicately carved mountings. Small hands wave greetings as we pass by in the street below. The buildings' faded pink and blue walls are decorated with friezes and religious symbols, all painted in bright colours. A monkey trapezes across a maze of electrical cables, hops onto a balcony and disappears behind a curtained window.
A cow ambles down the street casting doe-eyes at pedestrians. A family of pigs snuffle in the leftovers of someone's lunch discarded in a storm-water drain. A skinny, piebald dog lies on the raised ledge outside his owner's shuttered shop, his muzzle carefully balanced on his forepaws. All the livestock in town bear the marks of the previous day's Holi celebrations - a bright pink handprint on the flank, a swathe of purple powder slashed over the back or a streak of gaudy yellow across the rump.
As you make your way up Charbhuja Road, you are able to look down the narrow alleyways through fluted archways which lead to more fluted archways. Almost every corner boasts another temple, each one elaborately decorated in its own unique style.
Traffic consists of ambling pedestrians, browsing animals, auto-rikshas, motorcycles and flatbed wooden barrows constructed from planks and used bicycle wheels. You are able to peer into the shops in a leisurely way to check out the wares without being pressured into spending your last rupee on another "closely-haggled bargain" an experience which is seldom achieved in sales-mad India.
At the end of the road, against the hillside, the fantastically constructed Bundi Garh Palace looms into view. Built in the 14th century by Maharao Balwarth Singh, the palace is known for its turquoise and gold murals which are still brilliantly colourful, despite the general state of disrepair of the palace itself. The palace is also known for its large colony of bats, which swarm from the windows at sunset for another night of foraging in the woods.
The palace is protected by the Taragarh Fort, or the White Fort, which is perched on the extreme tip of the hill. In its heyday, this star-shaped fort also collected and stored rain water in its large reservoirs carved out of solid rock, thus supplying the palace with a ceaseless supply of fresh water.
The fort can be reached by zigzagging up the 500-metre high hill. The views from this vantage point are magnificent, providing a panorama of the palace and the blue-tinted town below, as well as of the surrounding countryside.
At the foot of Bundi Palace we find the old stables which housed horses and elephants in times gone by, with semi-circular tie-posts still in evidence in the courtyard. The stables have since been converted into a guesthouse called The Royal Retreat, where we spent the night as guests of Rajasthani's royal ghosts.
The hostel is eerily quiet. The only creatures now haunting the courtyard are the occasional angry wasp attacking the water-cooler, the uninvited scorpion trying to hide in my slipper and the fat brown frog belching outside our bedroom door. At night, the palace is floodlit, providing a rich golden backdrop to our bare sleeping quarters.
Our taxi to Kota was booked for early in the morning to avoid having to make the half-hour trip to the train station in the worst heat of the day, so we did not have enough time to visit the town's step-wells and water tanks.
On the drive out of town, we passed the Nawal Sagar water tank which proved to be as empty as the lakes had been in Udaipur. Although we missed seeing the town's water features at their best, we are grateful that we were able to share in an ordinary day in the friendly town of Bundi.
If you go
- Visas: South Africans need a visa which can be obtained locally at no cost.
- Getting there: SAA has three direct weekly flights from Johannesburg to Mumbai. It also flies via Hong Kong and Singapore, allowing for a stop-over en route.
- Getting around: India rail tickets may be bought in Mumbai at either Victoria Station or Mumbai Central at the "foreigners & freedom fighters" counter. This is the shortest counter.
- Weather: Avoid the monsoon months from June to September.