SMS Hotel Jaipur

... of elephant pooh are easy to spot and dodge, and we are enjoying the walk after being squashed in to the tuk tuk. But we hadn't factored in the hawkers - with a dizzying array of puppets, umbrellas, mini elephant things, beads, bangles, boxes and goodness only knows what else they make their move when you are half way up with nowhere to
go.

Martin stopped to take a quick photo of the star flowerbeds where the old Emporer used to grow Saffron ...

... printing fabrics, we went to see a Bollywood film in an exquisite theater, and saw a temple devoted to monkeys. Rajasthan is worth seeing, just very quickly, and after we get though, we can finally relax.

*NOW LET ME SAY... I do not believe this is true of all Rajasthani men, or even of a majority. Its just that its been our experience with those we do encounter (uneducated- lower class) that its pretty regular, and quite annoying.

... Haha, I had
no idea what to reply to that.



Anyway, arrived safely and hit the hotel. Had managed to pick out a
pretty nice one too! Just as well as I actually needed their help and
support a bit whilst I was there, due to the following. I decided that
having been cooped up on the train for 4hours what I needed was a nice
evening stroll. So the hotel recommended that I take a walk down to the
old town for sunset ...

... geweest en daar kregen we een henna. Eerst kreeg de bruidegom zelf een henna en ik werd midden in de kring van toeschouwers getrokken en moest naast de jongen gaan zitten en iedereen nam foto's. We wilden al graag een keer een henna hebben maar we vonden het niet zo leuk om naar een winkel te gaan en er dan voor te betalen dus dit was helemaal perfect. De dag van de bruiloft waren we weer in Balodi, we sliepen namelijk in een ander dorp, en hebben weer met de kinderen ...

... Départ 23H et arrivé 5H. Parfait pour nous. Puis sacs en consigne et visite de la ville. A peine arrivées nous sommes accostées par le rickshaw que Guillaume et florent avaient pris pour faire le tour de la ville la veille ! Décidément c est fou...Nous n'avions pas envie de visiter en rickshaw mais à pied et nous sommes donc parties direction la ville rose et le palais des vents après un rapide casse croûte dans un bui-bui appelé ici baba. Nous avons beaucoup march ...

... one of the highest mountains overlooking the massive city of Jaipur but there is absolutely nothing inside it except the odd monkey, pigeons and chipmunks.. After a long day we both felt a little battered and bruised from this busy and aggressive city with people hard selling to get us to part with our money. At one point they wouldn't take our money as unbeknown to us one of the notes was a forgery. As soon they ask us if we are ...

... surrounded by hills and walls around the hills, but isn't quite as impressive as the enitrly formidable fort seen at Jophur. We knew we'd entered the 'golden triangle' that is the tourist trap of Agra, Jaipur and Delhi, as we got hasled constantly to buy this and that, over here 'no' has an entirely different meaning, apparantly it means "Goodness! how wonderfully impressive you little Taj Mahal snow globe with flashing light is you have there ...

... secret stairs, passageways and porches that are exquisitely adorned with marble and mosaics. This is the good part. The bad part was our tour guide whose name I can't remember and for reasons which will become apparent in the blog later, I don't care to remember either! In the middle of showing us around the fort, he suddenly said "after this, we go to the shop that sell pashminas, ornaments etc" we said we weren't particularly keen on shopping but really wanted to ...

... fourteen major geometric masonry devices for measuring time, predicting eclipses, and tracking stars in their orbits, with references to the Zodiac. It's an amazing observatory even with renovations in progress, and the huge sun dial still shows accurate time. Our guide was a complete contrast to Dinesh (Hawa Mahal guide), still polite but rushed us through the 'tour', just covering the basic facts. As the markets were fairly close, we did ...

... our driver drove us through the pink walls into the pink city and we learned something at every moment (about the walls, the shopkeepers of hundreds of years ago and now, politics, invasions, and so on). After several kilometers through the city (all the walls really are pink, or much like a terra cotta vase), we left the walled (older) city and went up a mountain on other (even) older city. This city was were the head military guy lived-this was the guy who was the ...