The Sweeper

This lady will spend everyday trying to keep the bus stand clean but it is a never ending job as the buses swirl the dust and passengers just drop their litter. I seem to have only been showing you the more sorry side of Jaipur so today on Picasa are pictures of the more up market side of the city – a huge shopping mall, hotels and new builds. There were good looking school buildings and further education establishments too.

The journey today was much more pleasant than the last even though it was 4 hours longer – 11am to 8.30pm. The driver was laid back and gentle with his foot, never used his indicator even when we swerved from side to side to pass other vehicles but he did use the horn, frequently. Might was right. The bus wasn't quite so fine, there were no seat belts but there were foot rests and curtains against the sun. After leaving the Jaipur suburbs we passed through a toll booth onto a 3 lane dual carriageway and my heart sank as I saw waiting ambulances lined up beside the road. However a bit further on more were being backed out from container lorries so I breathed again. The central reservation of our road contained bougainvillea and oleander bushes in flower and the occasional tinsel covered shrine which our driver acknowledged with a hand to his heart. The countryside became quite arid scrub land with acacia trees, the earth in many places having been harvested for the brick making plants.

All along our route via Ajmer and Chittorgarh to Udaipur there were so many 'hotels' – restaurants – where food was being cooked in huge pots and chai was steaming, usually with a stall selling crisps and cold drinks. Some just had tables and plastic picnic chairs but others also had charpoys (beds with woven latticework) to lie on. Beside the parking area was often a water tank or pump where lorry drivers could wash themselves and their clothes and dry the latter from trees and posts in the sun.

I love to travel by bus for you can look over fences and into lorries which contain such a variety of things: cows, chickens, people (women sitting on the floor with the men standing at the back), polythene wrapped wheelie suitcases, slabs of marble (Rajasthan's major industry and export), faced building stones, iron bars, army tanks, sacks of potatoes and onions, tractors etc. and there were tankers of all sorts bearing the ominous word INFLAMMABLE. There were sudden patches of green where crops had been irrigated and they usually contained the bent backs of women weeding. A water buffalo was being scrubbed in a pond by two girls and beside them a woman was doing her washing. The water didn't look that great! There were vast electricity sub stations and smaller ones that didn't have safety fences around them.

Many of the small towns were by-passed by fly-overs. Now why can't we do that instead of carving up good pasture? On their outskirts were long stretches of workshops for repairing lorries with boys pushing wheels about and legs sticking out from under engines. Beside and behind these workshops were the graveyards of vehicles that had come to some ghastly end. In places there were stalls selling brightly coloured cushions and what looked like long gaudy fly swats. I think they were probably meant to attract the lorry drivers for they like to decorate their cabs with tinsel, metal and wood fretwork, velvet and swags. Apparently the best drivers come from the Punjab (as the most artistic come Bengal) and they seemed very small. They were courteous to us and often a little hand would come out of the cab to wave us by and they would slow down to allow us to swerve in front and pass a vehicle in our way. Poor drivers and their young sidekicks, their days are long, they sleep in their cabs and make use of the prostitutes so HIV is one of the lorry driver's hazards. There has been a drive to improve the condition of all vehicles but we did pass one moving forward like a crab. The police set up chicane road blocks with three metal fences to slow the traffic right down and wave their lathi sticks at vehicles they want to inspect.

In Udaipur I had the usual fight with the rickshaw drivers over the price – finally got so exhausted I started to walk and of course there was one driver who followed me and offered a more sensible price. It was still double what I should have paid but it was a long day. Now I'm in a new, clean and quiet little guest house

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