John P. Brackin - Freelance Writer - Articles

Travel Memories: Rajasthan, Northwest India

By John P. Brackin

At the Taj Mahal My experience in the subcontinent is limited to a several-week vacation I took with my family in 1997. We arrived in Ahmadabad, via London and Bombay, and traveled our way up to Delhi in the back of an oversized tourist van—which was actually more like a bus, better suited for a school field trip or a Partridge Family reunion tour. We numbered only five, but the bus seated at least twenty, and I couldn’t help but always feeling as though the rest of our group was about to be arriving shortly. They never did; it was always just us.

Just us and our travel guide’s entourage: For whatever reason, our travel guide traveled with a group of three others—one bus driver, one wife, and one not-very-identifiable-hanger on—which meant that there was always nearly a one-to-one ratio of traveler to travel assistant. This made the trip exceedingly accommodating—there was always someone there to help us with our bags or our language or our food—but even with the additional people, we still didn’t have enough to come close to filling that van: in fact, I think we could’ve doubled our size and still not have filled it. It was like being the last group of kids to be dropped off the school bus—for seventeen days in a row.

Initially we considered it a sort of a blessing: there was plenty of room to spread out—in fact we each got our own double seat—and it made for a pleasant contrast to the claustrophobia of the streets. (India is famous for the constant activity that goes on in its streets.) But once we got rolling, that first night, we realized that nothing short of a new set of shocks would make that bus ride very enjoyable. The road to Udaipur was one of the worst—okay, who am I kidding, it was the worst—I’d ever seen. And not only was the road tough, but the traffic was nonstop: a constant stream of headlights and horns, heading straight towards us, just barely missing us by swerving at the last second. And despite having just arrived from a twenty-plus-hour plane flight, I don’t think I slept a wink for the entire duration of the ride.

On one of the last days of the trip—having completed our loop and returned southward to Ahmadabad—we drove out to an area of Gujarat called the Little Rann of Kutch. Kutch is one of the wilderness regions that borders Pakistan and is home to a breed of wild donkey found only in India. The land there is wholly unique: a flat, dry plain, with sprawling salt farms that glisten in the sun. The game-watching was only a moderate success—whenever we neared, the donkey started, and we seldom got closer than seventy-five meters—but the terrain there was nothing short of spectacular. At one point, we stopped and walked around, examining the salt and taking pictures of the vast, cracked land. Of course, by that point, we were no longer using the bus; the land there was just too rugged and dry.