If a camel driver asks if you want to see the well, then just say yes.
When we lived abroad we took excursions to places in easy proximity by plane or car, always seeking an adventure, something deliciously different. Our ears perked up when a native suggested we eat in a neighbor's two-table restaurant on their back porch, take a trail to a cave, or check out the lower level of a municipal building to see its ancient civilization foundation. These explorations are the highlights of our travels, and memory joy sticks for a life well lived.
It was spring, 1997. We were living in Nepal and flew down to visit our friends, Seema and David who were living in Delhi with their two children, Kiran and Priya. Kiran was Chas's best friends from our previous posting in Ghana, and his mom, Seema, and I were also close companions. Seema prepared twelve vegetarian dishes for our arrival lunch. Delicious food. If you want your kids to eat more vegetables, serve them Indian food.
We were planning to rent a car and drive India's golden triangle, a tourist circuit which connects the national capital Delhi, Agra and Jaipur. We planned the Taj Majal as our finale, unaware that the first leg of our trip would surpass the rest.
Seema and David suggested that they join us for our first weekend out from Delhi. They had heard from Delhi friends about a new hotel on the Delhi Jaipur highway. A different kind of place, one we would like. Possibly magical.
The "hotel" was a 550-year-old fort palace. In 1947, Raja Rajinder Singh of Neemrana abandoned the property as the façade crumbled and its ramparts began to give way. For forty years he tried to rid himself of his liability but there were no takers. Finally, in 1986, the ruins were acquired for restoration.
Neemrana Fort Palace had a soft opening as a hotel in 1991 with fifteen guest rooms, while construction continued. Today it has 77 guest rooms spread over 14 levels cut into a hillside. The moat is now a pool and health spa. The amphitheater in the courtyard has been restored and the hanging gardens are lush with flowers and vines. It is an award winning hotel and popular weekend get-away from Delhi. But in 1991 it was a bewitching hideaway. Unadvertised, you had to know about it.
When we parked our cars and walked up the drawbridge entrance, we sensed that this weekend would be unforgettable. As we checked into our four rooms, we had to hold our children by the reins. These kids could play for hours just on the fuel of their imagination. Here was the setting for their wildest dreams and they were ready to run free.
The desk clerk asked about our health before assigning rooms up six and eight flights of stairs. He cautioned that it was easy to get lost in the palace. We should not panic but use the intercoms found along the passageways to call for help. Someone would come and lead us to our chambers. Again and again and again.
For the kids, getting lost was the best thing of all. Being parents who followed the roots and wings parenting philosophy, we required that they show up at designated times for three meals; and an optional tea-time in the afternoon. We located the children's sleeping quarters, which were a troubling distance from their parent's quarters, and then we set them free.
On that weekend, only three or four other guest rooms were booked and we rarely saw anyone other than an occasional staff person. I might add, that we rarely saw our children. We had the palace pretty much to ourselves. This created an atmosphere that sparked imagination in all of us. We were stepping back in time. We complained about the winding steps and labyrinth passageways, as adults might do, while also feeling the thrill of being out of our comfort zones, each of us imagining what it was like to live there, hundreds of years ago.
The refurbished chambers were simply and beautifully appointed with carved beds and tables. The bed and sofa were covered in colorful, hand-woven cottons and silks. The walls were made of mammoth stacked stones that whispered stories. When we were weary from exploring, we relaxed in our rooms, mesmerized by the sheer white drapes flapping like flags through the giant windows out toward the vast semi-desert landscape. We inhaled the exquisite honor to step back into history. The cacophony of ancient wars and celebrations reverberated at every surprise turn.
The food was good but it was the novelty of dining in different locations that pleased us the most. Breakfast and lunch were served in the great hall. Afternoon tea and cocktails were offered in a secluded turret. When night fell we were directed to the courtyard. The cloth covered tables were dramatically lit with candles. Floodlights on the ivy covered walls created a sensation of dining in the base of a well.
To this day the children have not divulged the full range of their explorations. We received a clue the first afternoon when Kiran and Chas showed up at tea-time, desperate for water, and covered in dirt and twigs. They had decided to repel down an exterior wall of the castle and landed in the dry moat. To get back inside they had to traverse the exterior of the castle back to the drawbridge and through the portcullis.
On the second day, the hotel staff asked if we would like to book a camel ride for the afternoon. It sounded interesting and we wanted to compare the experience of traveling by camels compared to the elephant Safaris we had taken in Nepal's Chitwan National Park. We said, "Yes."
Outside the castle we mounted the beasts, two on each, beautifully bedecked in colorful saddle cloths and two-seater, leather saddles. The camel drivers led the camels on a lumbering walk through the village and beyond into the arid fields.
The sensation was that of riding a row boat over ocean swells and it was necessary to adapt a swaying body movement to reduce discomfort. We decided elephants were a preferred mode of transport.
The camel drivers asked if we wanted to see the well before returning to the Fort Palace. We looked out across the landscape and saw nothing more than remnants of harvested grain planted in reddish soil, hard as a brick. We looked at each other and shrugged. Why not? Nothing else to do.
We lumbered on and after a bit, the camel drivers stopped and tied the camels to wood posts that had once been part of a fence. "We'll walk from here," announced the lead man. We looked around in wonderment that there was nothing in sight. As we started to walk we made out two perpendicular stone carved walls, approximately a foot tall and twenty feet apart, that blended easily into the landscape.
When we reached the stone walls, we could now see a vast set of approximately 200 stone steps leading down into the earth.
We were awestruck by the beauty and the engineering feat to build this manmade chasm. The thought of digging one set of steps in the hardened soil and bringing in the stones for building them was off-putting, but these steps went on endlessly.
No one asked whether we wanted to climb down the steps to the dark pool below; nothing could have stopped us. Unless we fell to our deaths, soaring downward along with the bats.
The steps descending almost vertically and had to be taken slowly and carefully. We rested at each level and circumnavigated a walkway with elaborate carving on the bannister and walls. Wall niches appeared every few meters and we assumed these once held art. Some ledges were cracked and foot holds were treacherous at times. Graffiti and trash littered the shrine. Green parakeets soared past us, up, down and around, adding to the dizzy allurement.
We continued downward past seven stories into the moist and cool interior wafting up from the pool at the bottom. We were told that two additional levels lie below the water's surface, as the water rises and recedes with seasonal rains. Secretly, I longed to find hidden treasure and quickly realized the well is the treasure.
We wondered how this magnificent structure could be abandoned. We were surprised that there was no literature provided at the Neemrana Fort Place to explain it, and further that it was not mentioned. On the other hand, we could see the liability issues of guests lost in freefall.
We asked our guides what they knew about the well. They said it had been used in ancient times as a source for drinking water, as well as for bathing and purification. They didn't know much more to tell us.
These were the travel days before Atlas Obscura, a guide to curious and wondrous travel destinations, founded in 2009. Its website self-describes the service as the definitive guidebook and friendly tour-guide to the world's most wondrous places. Travel tips, articles, strange facts and unique events.
Over the years these were the places our son dug up through his own research, urging us to take little detours from our travel route, often down a rabbit hole. For example, once we were driving across the Tanzanian savannah on a rutty road and out of the blue, he yelled, " Dad go that way!" "What way? There is no road." "Just do it, dad, and you will see some amazing fossils."
So Chas was a prime audience for the Atlas Obscura. I became aware of this travel resource, when Chas used it to stir up what might have been an ordinary vacation in Barcelona. Our two kids sat in the back seat of the rental car with their own navigation tools, often resulting in a verbal war from the backseat. Each proved worthy. Bronwyn's approach assured us we wouldn't get lost; and Chas's assured that we would. We need them both, our yin and yang children.
Bronwyn could stand on a street corner and tell us where the locals eat paella within a 5-minute walk. Chas could provide a break from driving to climb through a crazy man's aerial maze built over many years. We kept asking him, how do you know this. He would reply, " Atlas Obscura," which we thought was simply Chas's name for his roads less traveled, and didn't realize it was an actual travel resource for those who prefer to travel off the beaten path.
That said, the Neemrana stepwell "find" was before Atlas Obscura, and the adventure remains one of mystery and family lore. I decided to see what Atlas Obscura has to say about it today. You can see photos and read the website's research. Find the link at the conclusion of this post.
Here are a few interesting facts from Atlas Obscura:
Neemrana stepwell is known as a baori. It’s a unique type of water-harvesting structure, thousands of which were built throughout India starting around 600 CE. They were perhaps the most significant and multi-functional buildings of their day, primarily providing water year-round. Marvels of architecture, engineering, and art, stepwells guaranteed access to the precious resource. Unfortunately, their past prominence was no guarantee of a noteworthy future, and stepwells slid off history’s grid. Today, most are entirely unknown to the world, even within India where they should be right up there with forts, palaces, tombs, and temples as sites for tourists to throng. The advent of the British Raj, modern water pumps, and plumbing all rendered stepwells obsolete and, untethered from their main purpose, the vast majority became dilapidated, anonymous, filthy, and almost always heartbreaking.
Located just a few kilometers off the busy Delhi/Jaipur highway, Neemrana Baori is among the most impressive stepwells in India by virtue of being one of the largest, deepest, and certainly one of the creepiest. It’s nearly inexplicable that something so extraordinary (not to mention humongous) as Neemrana appears on no itinerary, in no guidebook, or in the accepted canon of architecture. Such is the case with nearly all stepwells, and only a relative handful are cared for. There is such an absence of factual information about most of them that scholars often can’t agree when a stepwell was constructed or who built it, as is the case with Neemrana, which has been ascribed to three separate centuries.
Neemrana Fort Palace, in its earliest phase of renovation, and the magical stepwell, provided a pinnacle adventure trip. Some years later, we moved to Bangladesh and chuckled at its national tourism slogan, "Come to Bangladesh before the tourists." We didn't think that would appeal to many travelers that we knew. But for our family, such was the adrenaline rush of meeting the unexpected.
The experience of exploring Neemrana Fort Palace and the Neemrana baori stepwell, alone, just us, touching magic, before the tourists, provided our own travel motto. Just say, "Yes," to the unexpected, the unknown, and the possibly life changing experiences that lie off the beaten path.
Photo credits:
All photos taken by the writer.
Atlas Obscura has additional photos of the palace and the stepwell: https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/neemrana-baori
You can climb down the steps to the well along with a Hindu speaking guide who claims the stepwell is haunted in this YouTube video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lDGgwjaiwM
No matter that he speaks Hindi; you will enjoy his enthusiasm and the site.
Neemrana Hotel’s web site is: https://www.neemranahotels.com/fort-palace-neemrana/
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