Jaipur - The Pink City

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.

The Amber (Amer) Fort - blooming big!!

Main courtyard at Amber fort

Ganesh Gate (he is above the door) - make a wish as you walk through

The Mirror Palace - Sarah wants our bathroom decorated like this!!

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!!).

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.

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....

The guide used this sundial to predict the time to within 1 minute - impressive!

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.

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.

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**

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.

Our bedroom - spacious!

The lounge area

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.....

Day 2: Old and New Delhi

Our first day proper in touring, and we have toured like it is going out of fashion! I will give you a quick weather update: it is lovely and hot here, with no need for cardigans or full length dresses. And Sarah doesn't need to wear those either.

We started out at 9:30am, which means we had to be up at 7:30am to get washed and breakfasted before the tour. I have to say the breakfast we had was more like a banquet, we had a toast course, crepe course, omelettes and fruit (we could have had more toast if we wanted to, and we also passed up the cereals course). I was completely stuffed to the point that I didn't need anything more that day until dinner later in the evening.

Our guide and driver were punctual and we were soon on our way through the Delhi rush hour. The city is huge and as such it means getting around it takes a *long* time, because there are all sorts of obstacles in the road, most usually cows. I am not talking back roads either, these are multi-lane carriageways and there are herds of cows in the middle of the road. Being sacred to the Indians, it means that there is a lot of swerving and dodging that needs to be done to avoid hitting one. this has a knock on effect to the rest of the traffic, and like a butterfly flapping its wings in one part of the world creating a hurricane in another, there are large tailbacks.

The rules of the road here seem to be: "if there is space then fill it; if there is no space then create some and fill it!". A lot of beeping goes on, and most of it is good natured and trying to inform other road users you are near them.

Anyway, I digress slightly. Our first stop on the tour was to look at the Qutab Minar - a Victory tower which was built using, according to our guide (Jai), the stones from the old city walls by Islamic invaders in the 11th Century.

Qutab Minar in all its (morning) glory!

Another shot of the Qutab Minar

It was very impressive, standing a full 70 metres high (no small feat for the time it was built) and Jai told us that there were plans to build a Minar over twice as high next to it, but the man who commissioned it the Qutab Minar died before it could be completed. Jai gave us some time to potter around the site taking photos and clambering over the rocks, before moving us onto the our next site.

Chipmunks are commonplace, and not shy, they will come right up to you.

Humayun's tomb is an impressive mausoleum and you can see the influences of it in the Taj Mahal apparently (we will find out tomorrow). Sarah's way of remembering this particular World Heritage site was by reference to the large amount of stone slabs in there!! We bimbled around the beautiful gardens surrounding the tomb and it was here that we noticed there are a lot of dogs in India and they all seemed to congregate here. Although I can't say I blame them, there are lovely gardens around the tomb, with plenty of shady spots to lounge in and if they get too hot they can, as we witnessed one dog doing, sit themselves in one of the pools of water.

Our first view of the tomb from the entrance gate

Humayun's tomb a.k.a. the thing with the stone slabs!!

Humayun's tomb, it is more impressive on the outside than within.

After that, we moved on to the Red Fort, Delhi. This was the third World Heritage site of the day, and while energy levels were flagging, I think we did it justice! The scale of the walls was epic by any standard; about 2/3rds of a mile in length and over 100 feet high. Even at this early juncture of our touring around India, the general impression I get about some of these wonderful sites follows along the lines of "yadda yadda yadda, and then the British came along and knocked that beautiful building down to build a barracks/ammunition store". This is certainly the case with the Red Fort where apparently over half of the inner buildings were knocked down to make way for barracks when the British were in India. For shame. 

The Lahore gate is the main gate at the Red Fort and is where, since independence, the Prime Minister comes on Independence Day to hoist an Indian flag and deliver a sort of "state of the union" speech to the people. The moat by the gate is full of cannabis plants and the fumes they give off is a very heady brew indeed (if you like that sort of thing) and I did wonder if the fumes inspired some of the Presidential speeches.

The Lahore Gate at the Red Fort, Delhi - no political speeches today though (thankfully!)

The smell coming from the moat reminded me of home!

After we walked around the fort, and due to a combination of my back hurting me and Sarah's swollen feet (she has been bitten to pieces and really reacts to the insect bites), we decided to give the mosque a miss and retire home for a sleep and a chance to put our feet up. It is no lie that half of our day of touring was taken up with driving around Delhi, which meant for a long day. The roads are so manic and busy that to get anywhere you need to give at least an hour.

That evening, after some painkillers for me, and some anti-histamines for Sarah (god, we are sounding like a right crocked couple these days!) , we headed out for a meal at the Spice Route, which is considered to be a lovely restaurant. The hotel hired me a taxi for the night, and from the journey to the restaurant it was clear how lovely a driver our pre-assigned one through Audley (Partap) is. This driver was undertaking, flashing, and beeping anyone who didn't get out of his way and on several occasions we had other irate drivers pulling up next to him to shout what I can only infer was the Indian equivalent of a swear word(s)! Still, he got us to the Spice Route physically, if not emotionally, unscathed.

As for the restaurant, I think we were spoilt on the first night with the authenticity and homeliness of the Shanti Home's food, and so we were underwhelmed with the Spice Route really. This had in part to do with the wine list which you would need a second mortgage to afford! there were bottles of wine on the menu for 120000 rupees, which if it was not a typo would set a traveller back about £1500! (i didn't dare to order it to find out!).

Anyway, that sums up today and i am heading off to sleep. We have an early start tomorrow as we are catching the 6am train to Agra to go and see the Taj Mahal! Fingers crossed we get up in time!!