Rajasthan Trip Report - Khem Villas

I take a bit of ribbing for not posting more about life in India. Ten days ago, Mom, Diego, Luis and I went up to Rajasthan and spent two days at Khem Villas near a Tiger/Wildlife Preserveand two days in the city of Jaipur. It was a fantastic trip. I've done a write up on the trip to post here. I am posting in parts, as I got a bit verbose with the write up. Also, I posted small pictures for the sake of space. You should be able to click on any of them to get a better view.

After a 90-minute flight, we arrived Wednesday afternoon in Jaipur – a city of 4M people; a small town next to Mumbai. The airport was tiny, reminding me of airports I’ve seen in the Caribbean. We got our bags together, found the driver that was sent for us (by the Tented camp we were staying at near Ranthambhore National Forrest), and set off for Khem Villas. The temperatures were much cooler in Jaipur; maybe about 60 F. But people were dressed for winter. There were lots and lots more motorcycles in Jaipur than there are here in Mumbai. Though there were still 2, 3, and 4 people on any given bike. The men tended to wear wool wraps around their bodies and warm scarves around their heads & necks.
The car was very quiet. Mom, Diego and I were trying to take in the scenes around us and even Luis seemed interested in the world outside the car. It didn’t take us long to get out of the “big city” of Jaipur; though there were “suburbs” for about another 30 minutes. Once out of the city, the road was a two lane road FULL of traffic. There were small cars and big cars, Goods Carrier trucks, people on motorcycles and people on bicycles, camel-driven carts and people-led camels, people on foot and a few people on horses. While the road had two implied lanes (no markings), in fact often both lanes had cars going in the same direction! Passing in India is not the same cautious endeavor that it is in the US. Cars jump up and around the car/truck/camel/bike in front of them – sometimes as many as 4 or 5 vehicles – before narrowly scooting back into their own lane in order to narrowly miss a head on-collision. I had certainly seen some wild passing in Mumbai. In Mumbai, the speed of the vehicles is pretty slow (because there is just so many of them). In Rajasthan, the cars were going 40-, 50- sometimes 60-mph doing this crazy passing game. I found it better to look out the side window than the front window.
Just at the edge of the “suburb” area, I look back in time to see Luis vomit all over himself. I call up to Diego, who is in the front seat, that we need to pull over. He starts to say that it’s not a good idea, the road is too busy, there are too many people on the side of the road, we should go a bit further. Luis vomits again and I tell Diego we have to stop NOW.
We pull over. The configuration of the car was such that we needed to pull the bags out of the back (hatch-back type car, not a trunk) in order to have some working room on getting Luis cleaned up. I’m still not sure how we got his clothes off of him without making more of a mess, but we did. Mom got him changed into new clothes and I started to work on the car seat (also a mess). Diego told me to take Luis and stand on the side of the road with Mom, such that the car was between us and the traffic. He then undertook cleaning off Luis’s car seat (which was on the traffic side of the car). Our driver very sweetly went across the street to get us some water to help with the clean up.
While standing there, holding Luis with Mom, I start to look around. I saw people and camels and dogs and goats and cows and more camels and more people and cats and more dogs. There are people in shops, men playing cards, women carrying great loads on their heads, women sweeping, all kinds of people walking by. I’m trying to take it all in, thinking that the scenery of people in India will never be boring to me. And suddenly, I realize: we are the spectacle in this scene, this white family standing on the side of the road with great big suitcases sitting on the ground and a man cleaning a car seat while his wife and mother (in law) stand by the side of the road and the driver drinks some water. Welcome to India.
I should mention here that Diego did an amazing job cleaning up the car seat considering all he had was a baby wash cloth and 1L of water. Turns out, his family took loads and loads of road trips when he was growing up. And his twin sisters would almost always, without fail, get carsick. At least once. Each. Diego has lots of experience in such situations. Thank you Diego!
After we got everything cleaned up and back on the road, the rest of the drive was great. The road was two lanes (sometimes a bit less) all the way to the Tiger Camp. There would be great stretches of nothingness, barely a tree, and suddenly a small village would pop up. Usually, it was just a few concrete buildings on either side of the road. Then, there would be a stretch were what looked like a rock foundation for a small strip of shops had been started. But there wasn’t anyone working. And there wasn’t anyone within miles. We saw a few buttes and some had small forts situated on top. Under different circumstances, it would have been fun to have taken the whole day to make the drive, stopping to see more of the various sites. Then, there would be these vast fields with what looked like a plant about 4’ tall with a delicate yellow flower. With the green green green of the plant and the blue blue blue of the sky, the little yellow flowers were spectacular. We asked the driver what they were: mustard plants. I know, the irony!
At some point, the driver turned on some music, very low. It took me a minute to figure out what it was – Toto’s Africa!! Then, we heard some Dancing Queen, Bettie Davis Eyes, You Make Me Feel Like Dancing, and a dozen other early-80’s classics. Diego was convinced that someone had found a mix-tape he’d made 25 years ago!
We arrived at Khem Villas, tired and eager to be out of the car. We were greeted with warm towels to wash our hands & face, a small glass of juice and warm smiles. I had reserved two cottages for us. The place is described as a luxury tent place and it was luxurious. The cottage had a spacious bedroom with a HUGE bathroom attached. There was a big, shaded porch and an open sun patio with each cottage. The finishing touch was a private outdoor tub and shower. It is by far, the biggest tub I’ve ever seen. Apparently, when the place was being designed, the British-half of the investor team insisted on big, big outdoor tubs. The Indian-half of the team thought it was a waste of money. As it turns out, all of the European guests RAVE about the tubs.
Luis had an early dinner of yogurt, toast and a banana (what he basically ate the entire weekend), and was off to bed. Mom graciously invited Luis to stay with her in her cottage. That the next morning was the first morning since Luis was born that I wasn’t listening for him to wake up. It was both great and made me a bit nervous. Although Mom invited Luis back for the next night, he didn’t sleep so well and it ended up being Mom, Luis and ME in her cottage – with Luis and me sharing a bed.
We used the babysitter/watchman trick we learned in Lonovala and had someone come and sit on the porch listening for Luis while we enjoyed drinks around a fire pit (it was about 50-degrees out) and then dinner on the veranda with little coal pots under the table keeping us warm. The highlight of the evening – at least for me – was crawling in to bed and discovering two hot water bottles (one by your feet and one at your back) warming the bed.
At 6a, we had a wakeup call the included coffee and toast. Diego and I were headed out on a Tiger Safari, while Mom and Luis stayed around Khem Villas for the morning (we weren’t sure if the safari would be Luis-friendly; it wasn’t). My strongest memory of the safari is that we saw a tigress walking on the road in front of us, maybe 30’ up. My second strongest memory is of how cold it was. I don’t know what the temperature was, but I’m pretty sure it was near freezing. Khem Villas provided us with a big wool blanket (to wrap around you as you would a giant towel) and a hot water bottle to keep us warm. Both were god-sends. Total, we did 3 safaris. Each adult got to go on two, and stay with Luis during one. Having been on safari in both Kenya and Tanzania, I was disappointed in our safari here. At Ranthambhore, I saw one tiger (yes, very cool, even if it was just one), one mongoose, one hyena, one wild boar, one special kind of owl (whose name I instantly forgot). The only thing we saw in groups was deer. They were beautiful, but didn’t quite meet my safari expectations.
It was nice, though, to see a different landscape of India. Ranthambhore (check out this webiste to learn more about the park) reminded me a lot of the US Southwest –Arizona, New Mexico area (probably Colorado & Utah too, but I haven’t seen those states with my own eyes). There were treed areas and open flat areas and small buttes and streams (mostly dry, but they get VERY full during monsoon season). Mom and Diego saw a beautiful like on their safari (each time, we were in a different area of the park).
The area of Khem Villas was lovely. According to their website, “Khem Villas is established on land that Goverdhan purchased in 1989 and converted into a wilderness area planting indigenous trees and creating open grasslands and small water bodies, spread over an area of 10 acres it has become a habitat in itself.” The camp had been carefully laid out so that each cottage or tent had some privacy while the entire camp was not very big. There were smooth stone walkways that connected the main building (where we ate our dinner), the fire pit/sitting area (where we had breakfast and early evening cocktails), the cottages and the two small lakes (very, very, very small lakes). Usha and her husband Goverdhan run the place and are in and out during the day. But each night, they joined us guests around the fire pit for cocktails and stories. It was a peaceful and beautiful place to spend two nights. It would have been nice to spend several more…
On Friday, before leavings, we signed up for the 30-minute camel ride. It was definitely a tourist trap, but an interesting one. Diego and Luis headed out on one camel, with me following behind. We walked out of the camp and down the road a bit to a large open area at the foothills of Ranthambhore Park. Being up on the camel wasn’t that different from being up on a horse – except that with the guide holding the reins, there wasn’t much left to hold on to. The camel laid down for us to get on it – folding it’s legs up underneath itself, getting very low to the ground. The standing up part (and later, the laying back down part) was a bit hairy. The camel moved in a big of a jerky way, first straightening his front legs (such that you were certain you would topple of the back) and then straightening his rear legs (almost pitching you over his head). Somehow, the laying down part was similar, but with three stages – a front, back, front pitch. After our ride was over, we asked if Mom and I could go back out for a short ride. For reasons that are still unclear, I was instructed to get off my camel and onto Diego’s camel, and then Mom got on my camel. For the second ride, we only went about 5 minutes up to the gate of the camp and back. It was short, but it was fun!
After lunch, we packed all of our stuff back in the car (with some extra water) and headed back to Jaipur.