This was a pretty short visit. There was one notable attraction to see, the havelis, and we had many more hours of driving to do. The main attraction of Mandawa (the city we were in) is 'havelis', which are big murals on houses. More can be seen on Flickr. Since we hadn't arrived early enough the previous day to view these, we went out to see them first thing in the morning. The city had previously been on the Silk Road and a major trading hub in the area, with many extremely wealthy merchants living there. They would commission the havelis on their houses. However, hundreds of years later the Silk Road is less of a thing and the town now seems to subsist on tourists coming to see the murals, most of which are in disrepair.
We saw a large number of houses with paintings on them.
Extremely detailed painting between the eaves. This took a lot of manual labor and a long time.
We paid for access to some still inhabited houses including one that let us go up on the roof for a better look.
Supposedly the fanciest internal paintwork in the town with a lot of gold leaf - wish they hadn't marred the room to add electricity and the fan and so on though
Showing the wear on the room
This is actually one of the images of India that stuck with me the most - cows eating garbage (directly adjacent to the crumbling wealth and splendor of the past). Apparently plastic getting stuck in their digestive system is a major problem.
The newest haveli in the town shows cars and aircraft, which had become extant between the older havelis and the time the newer one was made.
Mandawa was kind of a tough one. The murals were actually pretty fancy and interesting for a while, but the clear poverty everywhere made enjoying ourselves feel out of place. We did not begrudge paying high prices for admittance and similar. The town is dependent on tourists at this point, but without enough work to maintain, repair, and restore the main attraction, it will probably continue to trend downward, like it has been doing for 200 years. Apparently French tourists are the most commonly seen, and English-speaking guests are pretty uncommon. The guide says most of the owners of various buildings don't live locally - they're allowing family estates in the country to crumble and only visit them every now and then. We also visited a miniature painting shop, but didn't get anything or take any pictures and will discuss miniature painting in another post including a more notable shop. After completing this tour we saddled up and headed for the much larger city of Bikaner.
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