A great guide is worth every rupee in India, especially to jump queues
It’s getting light and the next stop is the vegetable and fruit market, cue a not entirely original anatomical joke relating to melons from the budding comedian. Then to the massive flower market, where huge quantities of flora are trucked in from the country each day to be assembled and used in temple and shrine worship. A few quips about deflowering – does this guy have a one-track mind? – and it’s back to the hotel for breakfast by 9.30.
Arguably nowhere is the tour guide more necessary than in India. Yes, it’s easy to visit the main sites yourself in most Indian cities. But a local guide can take you places you would not easily find; essential if you’re also pushed for time.
<source media="(min-width: 1180px)" data-srcset="https://static.ffx.io/images/$zoom_0.138%2C$multiply_4%2C$ratio_1%2C$width_378%2C$x_10%2C$y_0/t_crop_custom/c_scale%2Cw_620%2Cq_88%2Cf_auto/ac8386f4ac1c903cad454c1d4e55a5447479a6a3, https://static.ffx.io/images/$zoom_0.138%2C$multiply_4%2C$ratio_1%2C$width_378%2C$x_10%2C$y_0/t_crop_custom/c_scale%2Cw_1240%2Cq_52%2Cf_auto/ac8386f4ac1c903cad454c1d4e55a5447479a6a3 2x" data-pb-im-config=" Banyan specialises in bespoke itineraries for individuals, couples and small groups. The company’s focus is to create journeys that are “beneficial for all involved; the traveller and the local communities,” says its founder, Jamshyd Sethna. Email info@banyantours.com or call +91 124 456 3800.
” />A flower market in Dadar, Mumbai.
I’ve arrived in India for three weeks, starting in Mumbai and heading to the main cities and sights in Rajasthan, plus some stops off the beaten track. These include a mixture of ancient temples hidden in the countryside, important historic sites, as well as natural adventures – including a leopard-spotting safari in the bush outside Narlai.
I fly to Udaipur where I pick up a car and driver, and head by road to Narlai, Jodhpur, Jaipur, Agra, and, finally Delhi. Between Jodhpur and Jaipur, we detour to Nagaur for the three-day Sacred Spirit Festival, an annual Sufi music festival held in a fort owned by the Maharaja of Jodhpur.
Over the course of the trip, a raft of guides help me to get tickets for the major sites, avoiding long queues. They explain the best ways to get to and from; the best times to visit – and make worthwhile alterations to my itinerary. They also save this unsuspecting traveller from all sorts of run-of-the-mill tourist shops, steering them instead towards the real thing.
Take my two-night trip to Agra for the Taj Mahal. Hundreds of people are queuing at dawn to see the shimmering white marble masterpiece. My guide takes one look at the queue, and puts to use decades of knowledge to divert the Taj’s lengthy entrance procedure. He goes off to get tickets, tells me which queue to join, and gets me through in no time, well before sunrise. In short, these guides do your homework for you.
There is a way to avoid the crowds at the Taj Mahal.
In Delhi, I learn from my recently married young guide how this arranged marriage worked, and see his lavish wedding photos. I’ve never been to an Indian wedding, but on this trip, I certainly hear my fair share of them: India’s cities are brash, loud and crowded, especially during wedding season when celebrations go into the night with a soundtrack of blaring music and bursts of fireworks.
Sensing my exhaustion with urban India, my guide explains it’s essential to escape the main cities for the countryside – and so we travel to an 18th century fort hotel above Delwara.
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Once the capital of the Mewar kingdom, Delwara is known for its exceptional Jain temples, with intricate carvings and domes. Now just a small village, it’s the perfect place to see some of rural Rajasthan.
The guide here is a young villager. He takes tours but runs an electronics repair business as his main gig, and has his own blog. He’s training two young women to be guides; they tag along to see him in action, and prove to be the only women guides I encounter on the entire trip. We go into the homes of locals, who make simple clay pots, then head onto Sadhana, an impressive women’s handicraft enterprise.
The Dilwara Jain Temples, in Mount Abu, Rajasthan, were built between 11th to 13th century.
There aren’t many opportunities for rural women to earn money and Rajasthan has one of the lowest rates of female literacy in India. In 1988, a local non-government organisation ran a women’s patchwork and embroidery workshop.
Slowly the initiative expanded to some 700 women in villages throughout the Udaipur and Rajsamand areas of southern Rajasthan.
The main workshop in Delwara takes orders for clothes and fabrics from fashion houses across the world, farming them out to these largely home-based rural women, thus linking them with global supply chains.
Their all-handmade products are of a high quality, fair-trade certified, and cost a fraction of similar goods sold elsewhere. But the Sadhna’s real strength is in delivering economic and social power to these women.
A few days later, back in Udaipur, my guide boasts of minor aristocratic connections as he shows me around the city palace, still the home of the Udaipur royal family.
Then there are the guides who are political ranters. In Agra, I get a virulently pro Narendra Modi rant from the elderly guide singing the praises of the prime minister, who has just opened part of a new highway from Mumbai to Delhi. It will eventually cover more than 1100 kilometres. (Forget that the BBC’s Delhi and Mumbai offices were raided in February after a Modi critical documentary was shown in the United Kingdom.)
At other times, I get equally virulent anti-Modi rants. These diatribes can be informative, and at the same time supremely annoying, but they are usually not hard to shut down.
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In Jaipur, the erudite Vineet Sharma guides on foot through the back alleys of the old city into artisan workshops where people carve temple statues; we wander past old havelis (private mansions), truly historic architectural gems. Sharma is the only guide on the trip who refuses to take a tip when I ask if he will accept a thank-you.
After a visit to the hilltop fort in Jaipur, another guide takes me to a simple rundown cafe specialising in paratha, the flatbread. They’re cooked on an open fire by the dusty roadside and the place is doing a roaring trade. It’s cheap, filled with locals, workers and trucks drivers taking a break, and I’m the only outsider here until two Dutch guys amble in.
An artist prepares an idol of the goddess Durga in Jaipur.
I’m pretty hungry and, through the guide, order paratha with potato, along with several other dishes. The guide starts to look worried. He orders himself palak or spinach curry. When my paratha arrives, the guide looks carefully and points to each of the side dishes I have ordered one by one, saying gently “you better not eat any of these”.
So I am left with the paratha and some spicy pickles, and feeling unadventurous. You see, at times in India, the best guide can even save you from yourself.
The writer travelled at his own expense; most of the trip, including guides, was booked through Banyan Tours.
