Bundi - boy

Already the big guns are out: Ciprofloxacin. How weak must my constitution be that eating and drinking in what must be no more than a standard dose of bacteria for these guys has such a detrimental effect on my fragile western gut. I shudder to think what a taste of a cow's every day feast would do to my system; undoubtedly turn it inside out and then to jelly or maybe the other way around.

 

We've not had any great meals here and I'm guessing there's a hole in the market for tourist restaurants because the locals have stepped in and opened their homes and roofs for this service. But seeing the sign 'rooftop restaurant' (with modest expectations) and then the reality never inspired us with confidence. The way to the 'restaurant' is usually through the house, up the inside stairs, through a bedroom, past an old man in the corner wondering what the hell you're doing there, past the kitchen, and finally up to the roof where a single small metal table covered with a stained plastic sheet and two rickety chairs await. Home cooking would probably be ok, but this was home cooking for a profit for strangers and we doubted whether our delicate western stomachs would be adequately considered, so we left. It turns out no place really considers this. Most of the restaurants we visited (and even drinking places where they put water in the orange juice - we found out too late) aught to carry a toilet rating indicating how many hours you should expect to be on it after the meal. What can one do? I guess giving tourists antibiotics free with a meal would be sending the wrong signal.

 

Apart from the Bundi belly, it is a much nicer place in terms of pace of life and quantity of tourists. There's another palace and another fort, but no sanitised tour and you're free to ramble around the ruins at your leisure as long as the numerous monkeys aren't blocking your way. There are great views of the town, countryside and of the putrid cesspool of a manmade lake that gives some of the guest houses overlooking it their distinctive smell.

 

We went to Ranjeet's Talkies cinema and saw a pretty dire comedy with the usual Bollywood song'n'dance numbers mixed in with some serious overacting and exceptionally bad dubbing. We didn't expect a good movie but we thought there would be a packed cinema and some atmosphere. I think we were in single figures so at the interval we left. Incidentally, although the plots of these films typically seem farfetched one of its more outlandish elements actually turned out to be fairly topical; a staged kidnapping where a boss in the movie was to pay the ransom for her servant who was the perpetrator and supposed victim. There was an article in a recent edition of India Today which seemed to suggest an epidemic of teenagers who arrange their own kidnapping in order to extort money from their unsuspecting parents.