As I write this post I am in a lovely air conditioned car driving away from Jaipur having spent the morning touring the city and seeing some of the lovely sights. The car has Wi-Fi so I can catch up on all the trivial little details of life (i.e. Football results) too!
We are off to a place called Bijaynagar which I think is halfway point between Jaipur and Jodhpur, so a nice rural place to get a feel for the real Rajasthan! But before all that let me tell you about our day so far. The tour started at 9am and we went off to the Amber fort (also known as the Amer fort) which is a fair way outside Jaipur. Our guide was Davinder and he was very good entertainment making us smile with his views on life and making note that almost everything in life is good with a nice scotch (apart from yoghurt).
He was very informative, but also gave us some flexibility to wander and take some time to explore the fort. It is impressively perched looking down at Amer which is a part of Jaipur, but slightly outside the city from what I can tell - there are also impressive walls stretching over the mountainside (according to the guide they stretched over 13km). There are three things to see in the fort really - the audience hall of the king, which seems to be a theme in all the forts I have been to thus far in India, the palace of mirrors, which must have been built by a load of crazy magpies and finally the harem.
We are off to a place called Bijaynagar which I think is halfway point between Jaipur and Jodhpur, so a nice rural place to get a feel for the real Rajasthan! But before all that let me tell you about our day so far. The tour started at 9am and we went off to the Amber fort (also known as the Amer fort) which is a fair way outside Jaipur. Our guide was Davinder and he was very good entertainment making us smile with his views on life and making note that almost everything in life is good with a nice scotch (apart from yoghurt).
He was very informative, but also gave us some flexibility to wander and take some time to explore the fort. It is impressively perched looking down at Amer which is a part of Jaipur, but slightly outside the city from what I can tell - there are also impressive walls stretching over the mountainside (according to the guide they stretched over 13km). There are three things to see in the fort really - the audience hall of the king, which seems to be a theme in all the forts I have been to thus far in India, the palace of mirrors, which must have been built by a load of crazy magpies and finally the harem.
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| The Amber (Amer) Fort - blooming big!! |
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| Main courtyard at Amber fort |
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| Ganesh Gate (he is above the door) - make a wish as you walk through |
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| The Mirror Palace - Sarah wants our bathroom decorated like this!! |
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| No Fort/Palace is complete without a Harem for the porcupines... |
The fort is impressive in its scale and so I took a panorama shot of it (I like my panoramas now that I have discovered them!!).
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| Panorama of the Amber fort, plus some of the fort walls (and some cows sitting in a lake to cool off) |
After the fort we drove back down and got a photo of the Water Palace - a pre-Udaipurian hors d'oeuvres, before we go to the Lake Palace. The Water Palace is now owned by the government and nothing seems to be being done to utilise it, which seems a shame to me.
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| A great Bond villain lair, if only the government would allow it to be used! |
From there we moved on to the Jantar Mantar which is the name of the observatory built by Jai Singh, the founder of Jaipur, which I have to say is both surprisingly interesting and amazing - the sundials are accurate to 2 seconds apparently and to test my guide I asked him to tell me the time using the sun dial. He looked at it and said he thinks it is 11.08am - he was wrong - according to my phone it was 11:09am! I was still suitably impressed, although a part of me replayed the scene in Crocodile Dundee where Mick checks Walter's watch before going over to the girl and impressing her with his sun positional skills....
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| The guide used this sundial to predict the time to within 1 minute - impressive! |
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| Me next to my starsign's sundial |
The observatory was a mishmash of steps and triangles and was like some crazy Escher drawing, or the ending of the film Labyrinth, but you couldn't knock the genius of the mathematics behind it all! The emperor was a big fan of mathematics and astronomy and there is even stuff here to help work out people's horoscope - so you could say he was a 18th century Russell Grant. It, along with the Amber Fort, are both World heritage sites, taking our tally on this tour so far to seven!!
After the observatory, we went to see the royal palace, I think Sarah is reaching her palace limit now and just wants to relax a bit more (I haven't told her that Udaipur is known as the City of Palaces yet, so keep that between you and me!) . Anyway, the palace was very nice but the main feature of it was probably the courtyard with the four different gates and the reception room with the solid silver chairs which unfortunately we were not allowed to take photos of. Someone tried to surreptitiously do this with an iWatch, and judging by the commotion and the amount of guards that appeared and escorted him out, I figured it prudent I kept my camera in my pocket.
After the observatory, we went to see the royal palace, I think Sarah is reaching her palace limit now and just wants to relax a bit more (I haven't told her that Udaipur is known as the City of Palaces yet, so keep that between you and me!) . Anyway, the palace was very nice but the main feature of it was probably the courtyard with the four different gates and the reception room with the solid silver chairs which unfortunately we were not allowed to take photos of. Someone tried to surreptitiously do this with an iWatch, and judging by the commotion and the amount of guards that appeared and escorted him out, I figured it prudent I kept my camera in my pocket.
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| The Royal Palace, Jaipur |
Finally, we visited the Palace of the Winds, called Hawa Mahal. I was expecting this to be a curry house offering particularly spicy curries, but it was a facade linked to the royal palace which allowed the women (concubines) in the palace see what was going on in the Main Street. It is just a facade really, but is very beautiful and one of the signature buildings of Jaipur.
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| Palace of Winds - You might think I'm being arty with this shot, but it is just a facade |
Now the countryside is flying past and we are weaving in and out of lorries on the road from Jaipur. I can't believe how fast the time is going - we have almost been away for a week and so are a third of the way through the trip! That is all for today, hopefully we will get to our hotel at a decent hour and be able to relax by the pool!
***Update**
***Update**
We have arrived at Bijay Nawas Palace by mid-afternoon and the weather here is getting hotter, I mean really hot!! The first thing we did after check-in was head straight to the pool!! The hotel is a former hunting lodge of some minor Indian royalty I believe, and they have kept the period features so it is a real step back in time to how things might have been. There is no Wi-Fi here which means I am writing this offline and will post it when i am in Jodhpur (hopefully).
Back to Bijay Nawas. I think we are the only people here, and they have given us the best room in the hotel. I feel like a Maharajah with the size of our room, it is just a shame we are only staying for the night, as this is a stop over to break up the long journey from Jaipur to Jodhpur. We have a spacious lounging area, a lovely big bedroom, our own dressing room, and a bathroom. On top of that, we have a large balcony on which to sit out on, but unfortunately due to this being rural and they are currently harvesting, it means that if you sat out there for too long, you would be bitten to shreds by mosquitoes and flies.
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| Our bedroom - spacious! |
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| The lounge area |
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| The balcony - we didn't do it justice! |
All that said, it is way too hot to be sitting outside anyway, the temperature at 10:30pm is over 30 degrees (don't feel jealous, it is uncomfortably hot!!). All I want to do is lie on a bed of ice cubes in a room with the fan on full blast.....
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