June 23 at 2:11 PM · Reports of water crisis in Simla and parking woes in Nainital made us decide perversely to tour the searingly hot Bundelkhand region of Orchha and Khajuraho. We banked on good hotels and prayed fervently for rains. The first day in Orchha was heavenly. The resort booked for us by the travel agency is beautifully located just behind the Orchha chhatris. The rain gods smiled on us and it poured heavily during the daytime with intermittent showers in the evening. Day two was hot throughout when we travelled to Khajuraho from Orchha, made more sweltering by the morose driver, Manoj, assigned to us for our week's stay. He seemed least interested in our travel plans, volunteered no information and sighed resignedly every time we made a stop on the tour circuit. I wondered if he was doing the job under duress or was it only us that he disliked on sight. All attempts at friendly chitchat were brushed off. We too finally subsided into a resigned stand offishness with him. The MP tourism hotel Payal in Khajuraho is deserted and we are the only guests in the sprawling estate. It seems the off-season is literally off tourists. We are here on a leisurly trip so this does not really worry us. Friendly Asif at the reception, a huge respite from the churlish Manoj, warns us that all our sightseeing will have to start by 6 in the morning because the day would be too hot to do anything but lie around in the hotel. He gives us a tourist map which we look at with some trepidation because our driver may fob us off with excuses. The evening is spent wandering around a sluggish market, killing time before the start of the mandatory light and sound show. Shopkeepers cajole us to buy but are friendly, not pushy, willing to chat to while away time. We enter the light and sound show wondering if we would be the only audience as had happened in Orchha. Fortunately a family of four and a young couple turn up to give us company. The Western Temples are everything one has heard and more...because to see is to believe. The architecture is stunning and the scale huge. The more I see old architecture the more I rue the flimsiness of modern construction which has neither the grandeur and the sturdiness of the old monuments, nor the lightness and eco friendliness of the huts of yore. The famed erotic carvings are variously attributed to the need to sate the wordly cravings before entering the temples with a pure heart, appeasing the amorous King Indra so that he does not strike down the temples with lightening and tantric rituals. Khajuraho is hot, the River Ken is ethereally clean for a river in India but running quiet and low. Raneh Falls, famous for rock formations of four types is deserted. River Betwa in Orchha was populated and hence had all the filth associated with humans. Ken looked untouched and heavenly. We spend the days in slow motion, taking our time, in no rush to go anywhere. We sightsee in the early and evening hours and spend the daytime in siesta. Two families check-in at the hotel on the third day and we are glad to see their faces. Pandav Falls in Panna proves to be an oasis of delight. The water drizzles down from tree roots, even in this hot, rainless month over the caves where the Pandavs hid during their year in exile as the folklore goes. MP has hosted the Pandavas extensively. Panna tiger reserve yields no sighting although the forest guide assures us that T1 is wandering somewhere nearby with three cubs. We console ourselves by thinking that the tigeress must have sighted us, though we were not as lucky as her! The biggest takeaway from this trip has been the delightful birds we saw in Khajuraho and Panna. The golden orioles were aplenty at our hotel. We saw the MP state bird Dudhraj, golden orioles, black orioles, neelkantha, flycatcher and other birds we could not identify but watched with fascination. Birds in cage do not seem as beautiful as those that fly free. What we cannot catch becomes all the more precious for its intangibility. We earmark Khajuraho and Panna for places to be revisited in the winters in the far future to see if we could capture what we missed this time round. Retirement has its own allurements. यार से छेड़ा चली जाए 'असद'/गर नहीं वस्ल हसरत ही सही seema