That night I went to the Holi Festival which was supposed to have Elephants doing things like playing polo!
But there were no elephants because of protestors. I guess the tug of war was too much for them, which is understandable. But at least let them show up and walk around! They were already painted and everything (I saw them at Amber Fort).
I thought I was at the wrong festival for a bit because there were no elephants but this had signs saying it was the official Jaipur festival. Tourists kept pouring in too, so I must have been in the right spot.They did not have nearly enough seats! So many people were standing everywhere that the people who did have seats had to stand on them to be able to see anything. In the end, I kept moving and got better and better spots until I was in the front row (people were either leaving because there were no elephants–I don’t know why, the music and performance were great–or going into the field after the parade). The parade was about 10 or 15 different groups from different regions of Rajasthan playing their areas music. The parade went left to right; I’m not sure why this is important, but the announcer kept saying it.
Because there were no elephants, the groups each did their own performance but people seemed confused by this as the announcer never said that everyone was going to perform. In the middle of the performances they had people do a turban tying competition, carry water on their heads, and a tug of war.
I ended up leaving early because the tour guide next to me had his group leave because he said after the people competed there would be nothing more but after I called my driver more people went on! I wasn’t going to call again, and everything was starting to sound a bit of the same. Plus I was tired of being in such large groups. Well, large drunk groups who were covered in paint–Holi was the next day, why were they covered today!
Also at the festival, there was a dog that got partially painted by an Australian guy which was really cute. I was sitting next to some Swedish people then and we could not stop laying with the dog. After I moved, there was a cute Indian boy who would not stop waving at me and the Russian lady next to me, but when his dad brought him over he didn’t look at us at all! Kid’s are weird. When he left, he kept waving. There was another Russian lady who slapped a kid for trying to sell her a henna tattoo. She then grabbed the girls arm and made her pose for a photo. Not a nice lady…Also some not nice English children who, when their parents told them to get off their phones and stop playing games and appreciate the festival (and then walked away), said to one another that they should go closer but sit in some way that their parents couldn’t see them so they could still be on their phones. The point of this is to show the diversity of the people there (and how you can’t really judge someone by their nationality).
There is some free mud, but most you have to pay to get into an area where there are slides and the like but the lines are massive. In hindsight I wish I had not gone there because we didn’t go in for long because we didn’t want to wait an hour (with no food or drinks) in the sun to get back into mud. The one that we did do was fun, where you run and jump onto a slide, like slip n slide but inflated. There were some rocks on it though, which I think was from peoples feet.
World Traveler: Asian Edition 