Desi Dialogues

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As a tourist in India, I wanted to visit the beautiful province of Rajasthan, in northwestern India. Being close to Delhi and the Taj Mahal, it is one of the most visited places in India, known for its rich and colourful heritage exemplified through the huge stately palaces, breathtaking forts and gorgeous temples.

With each city having something unique about it, this province is, by far, one of India's best places to visit. In fact, sitting in a bus to the small village of Pushkar, famed for its camel rides in the Rajasthan desert, I was pleasantly surprised when I met some chirpy teenagers from our very own Toronto.

I was even more intrigued to learn the University of Guelph has a program that sends Canadian students to study at a Rajasthan university.

One student from the university who is studying political science said she comes to Rajasthan every year to complete her studies as it is a great learning experience with an international perspective.

Indeed, some cities in Rajasthan are truly worth visiting.

Jaisalmer (the last border city of India, only some kilometres away from neighbouring Pakistan) is famed for its desert sand dunes. And if you've never visited a desert and taken a camel ride across it, this is your chance to experience rustic life. At the sand dunes one can spend a night in the desert in a wooden hut or tent, listen to folk music around a bonfire and make it a truly memorable trip.

The city of forts, is Jodhpur, and the tourist attractions are well maintained by the (King) Maharajaha of Jodhpurthe. And yes, there are some Maharaja's still living in India.

One also shouldn't miss the world-famous Dilwara temples in Mount Abu (the only cool hill station). The temples built hundreds of years ago have extremely intricate marble carvings.

But a word of caution for anyone travelling in this great province. Your best bet is to make travel arrangements in advance - all reservations by rail and hotels should preferably be pre-booked to avoid being fleeced or paying exorbitant rates.

Also, it's better if one travels in the trains rather than the well-connected buses running in the province. The prime reason (for me and many female readers who especially will empathise with me) is that the buses make stops at local joints where the bathroom facilities are non-existent or extremely bad.

While it may sound like a funny reason not to travel by bus - trust me - it becomes a problem when bus journeys take eight to 10 hours. In fact, I am telling you what many glossy brochures fail to mention - as a tourist one must carry hand sanitizers and an abundance of bathroom tissue if you are traveling by bus.

And I am often reminded of the familiar adage - the more things change, the more they remain the same, which is that poor bathroom facilities were always the bane of Indian travel and I am sorry to say there isn't a great change on that front, at least not that I could see on Rajasthan's roads.

But if you want punctual, extremely fast and spur-of-the-moment travel within the province, then the buses are your best bet.

Another thing that saddened me is that while Rajasthan as a state seems to garner a lot of tourist attention, it is sad to see that small towns still may not have the deserved infrastructure.

For instance, during my travel to Jodhpur, my bus stopped at a local village called Pokhran, the place where India conducted its secretly held nuclear underground blasts, and heralded that place on the international map. Sadly, the town has frequent power outages and lacks many basic facilities. Shopkeepers say in the scorching heat they cannot provide cool drinks because their refrigerators and cooling equipment seldom work.

As a non-resident Indian, I am proud that places such as Rajasthan are appreciated by the teeming millions worldwide, but I truly feel the tourism ministry in India needs to put a bigger percentage of their tourist revenue to better the lot of the local Indians.