India Food: As Good as Expected

Tara enjoys playing the "which country is best" game, and she often asks which country on our trip has the best food. For the last several months, I have been answering India. Now that we have actually arrived in India, I can confirm that it probably does have the best food of the countries we have visited (though Ethiopia is in the running). Unfortunately for our readers, most Indian food looks basically the same. We will try not to bore you, though.

Despite warnings from lots of people not to eat the street food of India, we made the decision long ago that no fear of illness was going to stop us from trying delicious Indian food. So far, so good. The first morning that we arrived, we went in search of food and found this guy selling balls of something covered in green sauce and disks of something deeply fried. And all in this cute, eco-friendly leaf bowl. Sold! They were really good. The disk had some potato and spice inside. The balls had some spice, but no idea what they were. A spice mint chutney on top. We bought some more. A bit steep at 20 cents per bowl, but probably tourist pricing for us.
Walking along the street made me hungry and the first thing I saw was someone selling rice with a chickpea dish. It wasn't very good, but could have been worse. After all, I didn't die from eating it.

Samosas! Samosas are everywhere along the streets of India. They vary from 6 to 12 cents each and always come with a tasty sauce, although the sauce is completely different at every place. It could be anything from a cold, sweet red sauce to a warm, spice curry. At this place, they were straight out of the fryer and came with both a sweet red sauce and a spicy mint sauce. Very good.

We have always been told by our Indian friends that sweets in India are much better than Indian sweets in the US. They are right--the sweets here are really good and are at best mediocre in the US, even when they are supposed to be the same dishes. They are pricey here compared to other food, though. Here I am with a small bowl of halwa, which has carrots, fruit, butter, and an assortment of spices. It is really good. At about 50 cents per small bowl, it costs as much as six samosas, though.

Our first night in Delhi, we went to a famous restaurant called Moti Mahal. Their most famous dish is the tandori butter chicken, with the buttery curry sauce so famous that they sell it separately if you want some extra. Dinner was almost $15, which is a lot for India, but it had enough butter to fuel us for days! And it was really good.

Our guidebook referred to "fried squiggles" as a popular street food. Here I am eating some. These were some of the best and cheapest of the many we have eaten--a dirty old man was taking them straight out of the fryer, throwing them in a vat of syrup, then lifting them out and putting them on some newspaper for me. Terrific! So sweet and crispy.

Walking along one morning, I saw many people standing around a stand eating something. So, I ordered one. I got a piece of bread filled with a slightly spicy mixture of onions and tomato, and a bowl of dal (lentils with spices). Tara, who was reluctant at first due to her perceived filth of the stand, ended up eating a couple of them after trying mine. We went to pay for the four we had eaten and it was about 20 cents (we hadn't known how much when ordering, which is rare for us, but given the number of street kids eating there, we figured it couldn't be much). Hooray for cheap street eats!

Sweet shops abound and most of them look something like this. We still have no idea what most of them are, so we will walk into a shop, ask for one piece of about three different things, then try them all. Almost all have been edible, and most have been really good. It is very popular to coat sweets in India with a thin coat of silver or gold leaf, which is edible. We still haven't gotten over eating a coating of silver on our sweets.

One of the best parts of the Golden Temple in Amritsar is the communal kitchen. Food is free for anyone and the idea is that everyone, no matter the background, eats together. So, they hand you a plate and spoon, show you to the floor, where people come around with huge buckets and ladle some onto your plate. We thought the food would be basic and not great. It turned out to be absolutely amazing. Some of the best food we have had in India, and it was free! (Small donation given.)

Many people donate time to the Golden Temple to help prepare the food. Here are women peeling garlic. About 20 women working full time to peel enough garlic to feed the 60,000 people per day who eat there.

This is what the plate looked like with some food. A sweet coconut dish, a delicious dal, and a chickpea dish. They bring around tons of chapatis (small flat breads) to go with the food. And you can have as much as you want! We will forever love Sikhs.

For dinner that night, we got hungry before we made it to the restaurant, so we stopped at what might have been the dingiest place in town and had a stuffed paratha with a chickpea curry. It was pretty good, and nicely fried and buttered. Tara was really afraid that we would get sick, but our stomachs are too strong for that.

We did make it to dinner at one of the famous local fast food places called Brothers. It was packed with locals. Tara ordered the thali (little dishes of many different things), and I ordered a mushroom dish of some kind. Here is what showed up. Mine was a bit bland, but Tara's was quite good.

At many nice restaurants (and some less nice), they bring you a bowl of sugar and fennel seeds (which taste like black licorice), just as some Indian restaurants in the US. Tara especially liked these colorful sugar coated seeds.

The next day, we went back to eat at the Golden Temple. They had a completely different menu, but the food was just as wonderful. Inspired by a blog post from our friends Ben and Megan, we went to visit the kitchen. This man showed me how to serve the dal, which takes four hours to cook.

You can barely see me behind the steam, but this lets you see how massive the cooking pots are and the fire that cooks the food. I am thinking about having some cooking pots like this installed in our future home.

Nearby was an equally giant pot of rice pudding that was almost done cooling. From these pots, they transfer it to pots of about 50 gallons that they carry to the kitchen, then put in the pails for scooping. Quite the operation.

The Golden Temple also sells Coke products at cost. In India, Coke makes a mango-nectar-like drink called Maaza. Here is Tara in love with her first Maaza.

I had to try the Thums Up because we had never heard of it before. It taste like Coke trying to make Pepsi. Not bad, but sort of strange that Coke here makes a second cola product.

In Varanasi, a guy had a shallow fryer/griller device with balls of potato stuff around the edges, so I had to try one. To my surprise, he fry-grilled the potato, then added about 100 things to it. From sauces to crushed, fried noodles, it had it all. Very good.

Here is one of our sweet samplings. The darker, wetter ones are gulab jamun, which we often have in the US. Mushy balls doused in syrup. The lighter ones seemed to be a mixture of sugar and sand (possibly with some added sawdust), and are apparently popular as a desert dessert where not much water exists. Not terrific, but better than plain sand.

Here is the guy making the potato thing from a couple of pictures ago. Look at that concentration on my food! What skill!

Now we start to get to dishes that look a lot alike. I honestly don't even know what both of these are, but they are some kind of Indian food. And I'm sure that they tasted great.

Well, that wraps up Indian food for the first week of our travels. Lots more to come! Now we suggest that you go to your nearest Indian restaurant and have some food.

Big Cats, Big Love, Big Taj Mahal

From Varanasi, we headed to the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh with two goals in mind: to see a tiger in the wild, and to see some erotically-carved ancient temples. Both of these goals ended up presenting their own special challenges. First, to the tiger park!

Tyger, Tyger

According to our guidebook, Bandhavgarh National Park is the best place in India to spot a tiger, one of the world's most endangered big cats. And based on the map, it looked like it wasn't too far off our proposed route through the north of the country. In reality, getting there required a 12-hour train ride in an overcrowded, roach-infested Sleeper car to the town of Umaria, where we then had to hire a car to drive us the 30 kilometers to the park village, Tala, since it was past midnight by then and the buses had stopped running.

We traded up to an unheated, mildly ant-infested room at Tala's cheap hotel, where we squeezed in four hours of sleep before our sunrise tiger safari was to begin. It was dark and really, really cold in the back of the open safari jeep as we bounced off to the park gate, which brought back happy memories of many such mornings in Africa.

During the four hours of our safari, we saw many nice things. Like the lovely park landscape.
And some green parakeets.
And sambar deer, the largest deer in India. A good feast for a tiger.
And spotted deer, which have spots, and are more light-meal-sized for a tiger. Not sure what the tiger would do with the huge, velvety antlers that this nice male had.
Is that a tiger? Nope, just a langur monkey. Langurs and rhesus monkeys were pretty common throughout the park. Also known as tiger snacks.

All this tasty tiger food...but alas, no tiger. As it turns out, none of the morning safari vehicles saw one. As we rolled back out of the park gates, we had to decide whether to pony up more money for an afternoon safari and give tiger-spotting another shot. Well, it's not like we had anything else to do that day.

So, back in the jeep for the afternoon. More nice landscape, more deer and monkeys and birds spotted. We had pretty much given up all hope when we came across a line of about 10 jeeps all parked by the side of the road to observe...

...a tiger! Lolling in the bush, taking a nap. It actually twitched its ears a couple of times and even lifted its head up once, but I guess all the tourists weren't interesting enough to come check out, because it just kept going back to sleep. Sadly, this was the best picture we could get.
So, the whole tiger-seeking experience was a little underwhelming in the end. But at least we saw one, and now have photographic evidence that wild tigers are not yet completely extinct in India.

On our way out of the park, we passed a group of wild peacocks. As I'm sure you have, we've seen peacocks on various fancy lawns around the world, but it was cool to see some in the wild in the part of the world that they actually come from.
So, that was it for Bandhavgarh National Park. Tempting as it was, we passed up the chance to spend another night in Tala and caught the bus back to the train station in Umaria, hoping to get on a train out of there. It turned out that our choices were a 1AM train or a 4AM train, neither of which had any reserved berths or seats still available, meaning we'd have to travel in the free-for-all that is General Class. Feeling fairly certain that we would not get a seat, much less any z's, on either of those, we chose the 4AM train and checked into another cheap hotel for another highly abbreviated night of sleep.

I don't think I need to say too much about the ensuing train ride except that there were people sleeping on the luggage racks.

After about 10 hours of travel on that train and two local buses, we finally rolled into our next destination, Khajuraho, home of a celebrated cluster of Hindu temples famous for their erotic carvings.

Kids, cover your eyes: Khajuraho

The carvings did not disappoint.
But, they aren't all erotic. For instance, there's this elaborately carved boar outside of the main temple. Who doesn't like a huge boar covered with reliefs of little people?

The temples themselves were built and carved around 1000 A.D., making them quite old and amazingly well-preserved. This is apparently due to their somewhat remote location (still the case from a public-transport perspective!), so the rampaging armies of the last millennium weren't able to find them to destroy them.

Even without all the carvings, the temples would be really impressive just from an architectural standpoint--check this one out from afar. These days, they are set in peaceful, manicured green grounds dotted with trees and azalea bushes, making for a very pleasant visiting experience.
While the place wasn't completely overrun with tourists, it still had some visiting groups, like this co-ed army regiment which really wanted to pose for pictures with me. But they wouldn't let me stick a feather in my cap and call it macaroni.
So, the temples around the complex are all covered with rows of wonderfully posed, very humanistic carvings of people, animals, nymphs, gods, etc., etc. Not all of the carvings are overtly erotic, but a lot of the best ones are.
Cover your eyes, fair lady! Also, note the enormous boobs, which are a common feature on all the female depictions.
OK, enough with the dirty pictures. Here is a big elephant who was guarding the corner of one of the temples.
And a huge sacred cow. Big enough to ride!
The temples were terrific, and Khajuraho seemed like a decent, if touristy, small town. Unfortunately, we only spent about three hours there, total, since there are only trains to Agra three times a week and if we didn't get on the one leaving at 6PM that night, we'd be stuck!

The reserved berths on the very short train were, surprise surprise, already booked out, so once again we found ourselves with General Class tickets. We ended up freeloading in Sleeper, lying in someone else's bunk until they got on the train a few stations later...then sitting four people to a bunk with some other freeloaders til we all got kicked out of that one...then, finally, sleeping on the floor. Luckily, this is a fairly new service and the train was pretty much as clean as could be. Some kind fellow travelers covered us with a warm blanket, and woke us up when the train pulled into Agra at the appetizing hour of 2AM. Another great night's sleep accomplished! Um, not.

Taj Mahal: Not a bad tomb

It took us longer to get into downtown Agra and find a decent hotel room than we'd hoped--I'll spare you the details. I'll just say that I was really happy when we finally crawled into a real bed around 5AM. Time to sleep! Except that the light on the Taj Mahal is supposed to be the best at sunrise, so we were up again by 6:30. Arrrrrgh.

Right, so, the only reason you would ever want to go to Agra is to see the Taj Mahal. It really is a beautiful monument and is worth the expensive ticket price and all the hassle and dirt of Agra. However, at least in wintertime, I'd say that the light on it isn't really that good until around 9AM, thanks to all the fog/smog. Yup, you heard it here first: if you're visiting in winter, no need to kill yourself to wake up at the crack of dawn (unless, of course, you want to beat the crowds, but we still found it fairly crowded as early as 7).

Blah blah blah. Here it is, the Taj Mahal!
No, that is not a fake backdrop, we really are standing in front of the Taj! It's just the stupid smog that makes it look all fake.
It's lovely to contemplate the Taj from afar, but it's probably even better close up, thanks to all the beautiful marble inlay. Built all out of white marble by Shah Jahan in the 1600s, the Taj is a monumental tomb for his favorite wife, who died giving birth to their 14th child.
You aren't supposed to take pictures inside the main tomb area, but Andy snuck one anyway. The lattice carving, bordered by inlaid marble, makes an impressive screen around the central section.
This picture was taken later, maybe around 8:30 AM. As you can see, the light's a little better by then, though it's still not great.
Agra's other main attraction is the Agra Fort, another Shah Jahan creation. Like the Red Fort in Delhi, it's more of a complex of palaces once you get inside the red sandstone walls.
Note the lovely carved and inlaid white marble, which is basically Shah Jahan's signature.
The Agra Fort was filled with one of my favorite flowers, coxcombs! Or, as I like to call them, fuzzy brain-flowers. Such fun to pet!
At the end of his life, Shah Jahan was imprisoned in the fort by his usurping son. I felt very sad about this until I saw his prison area, which may be the most beautiful carved marble in the world. Spacious and airy, too, and with great views of the Taj Mahal downriver. I can think of worse prisons, to be honest.
The fort grounds are filled with playful monkeys. This baby was snuggling with its mama in a quiet corner.
One more shot from the fort. Nice lawns for monkeys and humans to play on.
After visiting the fort, we raced to the train station to actually reserve some seats to our next destination, Jaipur. I'll wrap things up here by saying that it was fun to travel in Madhya Pradesh (where the tiger park and Khajuraho are found), though it might be easier if you had your own transportation. Agra is not such an exciting city, but the Taj Mahal can't be missed, and the Fort is pretty nice as well.