India: Holi in Udaipur

I just got back from 2 weeks trekking around the Annapurna Circuit, more on that exhausting but exhilarating expedition later.

going all the way back to March 20:

From Jaisalmer, I continued my loop of Rajasthan by heading east to Udaipur for the madness of Holi, the Festival of Color. wikipedia says:

Holi (Hindi: होली), or Phagwa (Bhojpuri), also called the Festival of Colours, is a popular Hindu spring festival observed in India and Nepal. In West Bengal, it is known as Dolyatra (Doljatra) or Boshonto Utsav ("spring festival").
On the first day bonfires are lit at night to signify burning the demoness Holika, Hiranyakashipu's sister.
On the second day, known as Dhulhendi, people spend the day throwing colored powder and water at each other. The spring season, during which the weather changes, is believed to cause viral fever and cold. Thus, the playful throwing of the colored powders has a medicinal significance: the colors are traditionally made of Neem, Kumkum, Haldi, Bilva, and other medicinal herbs prescribed by Āyurvedic doctors. A special drink called thandai is prepared, sometimes containing bhang (Cannabis sativa).

for those not in the know, that last part there is about weed.

I rolled into Udaipur at 5:45am, fresh off my first Indian bus experience, an overnighter from Jaisalmer, which was as whacked out as the rest of my trip up to this point. The travel agent sold me a "direct" ticket on a "deluxe sleeper" from Jaisalmer to Udaipur, but of course the bus I got turned out to be "very crappy"with a "2 hour stopover" for no apparent reason in a largish city called Jodhpur. During this time I met the only non-Indian passengers on the bus, 4 women from Thailand, aged 20, 24, 36, and 50, none of them related but all traveling together. talk about random. The older one was incredibly entertaining, she had this classic Thai smile, and at one point she got into a jokingly heated argument with the Indian bus driver when she had some problems with the location of her assigned seat (she said she would throw up if she sat in the back). By the end of the lengthy exchange, which she lost, the entire bus had taken sides and was cheering on their favorite.

For the overnight portion of the bus ride I was crammed inside a little box above the seats; my bed. I gave up trying to sleep after a couple hours because the road was apparently covered with giant boulders and the driver liked to hit his extremely loud, musical horn every five minutes (presumably to warn cows and water buffaloes off the road), so instead I watched the Indian countryside and villages pass by under the light of an almost full moon. seriously, who needs drugs when you've got Indian overnight bus rides? Anyways, I got to Udaipur in one piece and sat outside my pre-booked guesthouse for an hour until the old lady who runs it woke up and opened the door, all the while fending off my rickshaw driver who kept checking on me every 10 minutes and wanted to take me to his "brother's hotel". Spent the day wandering around the streets of Udaipur, which The Book says is 'one of the most romantic cities in India'. and it really was gorgeous. Udaipur's claim to fame: They filmed the Bond film Octopussy in the palace that sits in the middle of the town's lake.

On almost every corner I came to, locals were building small towers out of bundled straw and dried cow/camel dung. That night, all of these bonfires were lit up, and the view from the rooftop I was standing on was a-mazing. Popping firecrackers and flumes of fire shot up for hours across the entire city. Directly in front of this rooftop, however, was the most amazing sight of all, the main bonfire. This thing was big, maybe 30 or 40 feet high, and towering over it was the enormous Jagdish Temple. people crammed into every available space. we were down there in the human crush until we realized that it might be a bit more uncomfortable on the roof.


For about 2 hours before they lit the bonfire, a couple trans-gendered individuals in saris entertained the (mostly male) crowd by belly dancing on a makeshift stage.

very strange. and then some of the GOOFIEST white people I've ever seen (the kind where you just shake your head in shame...), got up there and awkwardly moved their bodies around for an amount of time that was far, far too long. after the Indians made sure us tourists were thoroughly humiliated, they moved the stage and lit the giant hay/shit pile on fire with a firecracker fuse that was several blocks long. this was the biggest and slowest fuse i've ever seen. it was a fireworks show in itself. finally, it reached the payload, and this mother went up quick and the heat was intense. it burned my face even though I was on a rooftop 6 stories up. Mind you, there were also hundreds of people on the ground next to this thing. I have videos, hopefully I can post those later.

after the fire died down, the locals spent the next few hours carelessly shooting fireworks at each other and dancing around wildly to a raging bollywood beat. one of the firework shells nailed a main power line and cut the power to half the city. from our rooftop we could see everything go dark, leaving only the hundreds of bonfires to light the alleys of the old city. a huge cheer went up, the music was put on a backup generator, and the party continued.

and that was just the beginning of Holi.

the next day was the Color part of the festival. I bought a disposable camera to take pictures because my other ones would not have survived the onslaught of colored powder and water:

From India - Holi

in case you can't tell from the pictures, it was a lot of fun.

this whole time I'm thinking to myself: Why don't we have festivals like this in America? Really, what do we have that compares to this...Halloween and the 4th of July? It's pathetic.

for me, having just gotten to India and getting to see one of the biggest festivals of the whole year, Holi was really an amazing experience, especially the opportunity to see all the Indians let loose and, you know, "mix it up" with us foreigners. there was this distinctly different, relaxed, positive vibe running through the whole city. I lost count of all the Indians who came up to me with cheers of "Happy Holi!", wiping color on my cheeks and embracing me. (unfortunately for foreign women, the festival is not such a positive experience. most girls I talked to spent the day hiding in their hotel rooms because a lot of the locals use Holi as an excuse to grope and fondle.)

It was a trip walking around the narrow, winding alleyways of the old city after the festivities had died down. The empty streets, the walls and telephone poles, even the dogs and the cows, everything was painted with splashes of brilliant color. weeks later you can still see evidence of the festivities. At one point, standing in the middle of the town square during the peak of the "color play", I was reminded of that very touching scene (gag me) in...one of those volcano disaster movies that all came out in 1998...where everyone is covered with ash and a little girl says to her Dad "Look...everybody is the same color!" Of course in this case, everybody was a lot of different colors, but it had the same effect...you couldn't distinguish anyone's race or age.

here are all the pictures I took on my digital camera:

India Dig. - Udaipur, Holi

after Holi, I spent one more day in Udaipur and then headed to Jaipur to meet up with my British friends Emily and Jessica that I had originally met in Bali. I saw the world's biggest sundial at Jantar Mantar which was pretty cool, broke my camera, got my camera fixed, found the Pink City and it's palace kind of a yawn, and bought a bus ticket to Pushkar.

I was on my way to the bus station when I suddenly realized that I didn't have my wallet. My stomach dropped out. I thought it must have fallen out of my backpack when I got out of the rickshaw. I quickly and panickedly retraced my steps. No, no, no, no, I kept saying, this isn't happening. I am too experienced of a traveller to make a rookie mistake like this. Fuck! fuck! fuck! then, i sat down and gave up. and then i found it, right there at the bottom of my backpack. i wouldn't be writing about this but during my 15 minutes of freaking out two things happened that are now, looking back, pretty funny: I almost cussed out a beggar woman who just would not leave me alone, not understanding that I had just lost all my money and access to money in this foreign country (atm card). also, at one point I asked a store owner if he had seen a wallet on the ground, and he got excited and said Yes and then I got excited and came over and he went in his shop and came out with a shoe box filled with brand new wallets and a big stupid grin on his face. I did one of those cartoon "Doh!" face slaps and just turned and walked away. I think he is probably still wondering why he didn't close that sale.