From Bundi

After a good night-and-day of travel, I find myself in Bundi, a magical, isolated city in Southern Rajastan. It's fantastically beautiful, and dominated by a huge fort on the hill above--but it is so intricate you think that the fort is the hill, and there is no hill underneath it. Kipling lived here for a while to write; it's certainly the place I would come to write a book. By Indian standards, this place is amazingly peaceful, and very friendly (the indian standard for peace is low and for friendship high). There is some tourist traffic through here, enough so that people are not surprised to see me, but not enough to create a real tourist economy here. I haven't seen any other forgeiners in my first gamble around the town. I got here via Kota, which is a small city in southern rajastan; I saw the old Maharaja palace, which was gorgeous and took way too many pictures. Then I made a 2.5 km trek through town with my big bag in the midday heat, and it made me feel like a badass. I appriciated that no one hassled me in Kota, nor here in Bundi, for that matter.

Thanks to my dad for this Kipling quote about the places I'm going:

"Jeypore Palace may be called the Versailles of India; Udaipur's House of State is dwarfed by the hills round it and the spread of the Pichola Lake; Jodhpur's House of strife, gray towers on red rock, is the work of giants, but the Palace of Bundi, even in broad daylight, is such a palace as men build for themselves in uneasy dreams-- the work of goblins rather than of men."--Kipling (By Jeypore he must have ment what we spell Jaipur)

So I'm hitting all of that besides Udaipur, which I hear is beautiful but I'm missing it anyway.

From here, I want to go to Jodhpur (on tuesday?) and then to Jaipur, then back to Delhi to begin my north India trip.

The internet is slow, so I will not try to post any pictures from here. If you haven't figured it out, you have to copy and paste the addresses I posted yesterday into the address bar. I put descriptions on photobucket, but I don't think they came through, so here they are: me and host family in McLeod Ganj, Madhav Shukla-ji and wife, R. Ramu Pandit on tabla, Goh Swami-Ji on sitar, and Pushkar lake. Not necessarily in that order.

The guy from the internet cafe is going to take me to see the lake soon.