Tourist Traps and Tour Guides

As I mentioned in an earlier post, having light skin attracts a lot of attention in India. Unfortunately, the extra attention also makes you an easier target for people looking to take advantage of tourists. Of course it didn’t help that nearly all the buses and vans we were driven around in had “TOURIST” written across the top (as pictured above).

Our first night in Jaipur, we were all very excited to have dinner at a cultural festival/theater that was supposed to teach us about the new state we’d just entered: Rajasthan (literally meaning ‘land of kings’ or ‘land of colors,’ depending on who you talk to). This is the largest state in India and also is the farthest northwestern area of the country, bordering Pakistan. While we were given traditional Hindi bindis and blessings as we walked through the gates of this “festival,” it quickly became apparent that we were going to be experiencing something closer to a circus than learning a historically or culturally accurate account of Rajasthani people.

There were camel and elephant rides, horse carriages, tightrope walkers, puppet shows, snake charmers, dancers, monkeys on leashes, people walking on stilts, and acrobats—just to name a few of the “attractions.” Having seen the newly released film “Water for Elephants” I was particularly sensitive to how sad the lone elephant giving rides appeared, when I saw it up close. I was actually looking at his face particularly closely because my younger sister, who is in Vet School at Iowa State and is going to visit an elephant sanctuary in South Africa on a study abroad program in May, warned me about male elephants becoming aggressive when “in Musth.” Apparently, you can tell if they are entering this hormonal craze by a dark streak of sweat that frames their face/jaw area. Luckily for the people taking elephant rides and the elephant handlers, this elephant didn’t appear to be in Musth, at least by my diagnosis.

At one point, a group of us came out from walking through an underground tunnel/cave walkway that passed by a huge (and roaring) dinosaur statue—to find what looked like aboriginal tribesmen holding wooden sticks and dancing crazily around a bonfire. Upon seeing us, they rushed over and handed us their sticks, and indicated that by holding a stick you had to join in on the dancing. While there’s no doubt this was fun for a few minutes, the moment was somewhat ruined when we stopped dancing and tried to hand back our sticks, and were immediately met with stern faces and outstretched palms demanding monetary donations.

The dinner we were served that evening was the most bland and tasteless meal we had the entire three weeks, which definitely added to our disappointment. We were later told that it was because they are cooking for tourists, whom they expect cannot handle traditional Indian spices. But, perhaps the worst part of this ‘fake India’ (or, “India Disney” as most of our group started referring to it) was that our tour guide that evening had told our professor that the experience was already covered in the tour fee for that day, however, upon our return toGurgoan—our professor received a several hundred dollar bill for our group that night.

You live and you learn—and it’s no different in India.