Jaipur
Trip Start
Oct 01, 2005
1
11
137
Trip End
Sep 20, 2006
Jaipur,
India
Friday, October 21, 2005
We spent the next day going to the Amber Fort (pronounced Amer Fort) as well as the City Palace and surrounding area in the Old City.
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Let me introduce you to Anil, our driver for our 8-day tour of Rajasthan. We didn't take to Anil really, and although we got used to him over time we never really liked him very much! He is 30 and had just got married four months previously. He is from a rural village in the state that neighbours Delhi, Haryana, and was very quick to tell us which caste he is from (because that's very important).
So far so good, until you find out a bit more about this tall strapping Indian chap! He seems to have a 'girl in every port' and had had a 5-year romance with a Japanese girl who he'd met when he drove her around India. Apparently his family were fine to let him have his fun for a few years but when it came to the crunch he had to marry someone of his own culture and, more importantly, his own caste.
So his family seleced an 18 year-old from his village, he actually had a choice of 5 girls who he met for 5 minutes each and then made his selection! She stays at home and looks after the house he's built in the Delhi suburbs with his father while he goes off for weeks at a time with his European ladies around India!
He's not a happy chap, Anil.
01 - Jono looks down at the 'Pink City'
He dislikes his job and longs to see the world but is now a 'prisoner' (his words!) of his wife. Over the course of the tour we heard lots of Anil's view on life, the British in India, life in India... and he would drop all these hints about how he didn't get paid well (because his nasty boss, who happens to be a Kashmeri Moslem, takes all the money for himself...) and how he was actually being honest with us about the commission shops he wanted to take us to because he had to feed his family blah blah blah... We were learning to take a LOT of what Anil said with a hearty pinch of salt, especially after comparing driver's tales with some other people doing as we were!Anil on cricket: 'Sachin Tendulkar is a god'
Anil on English girls: 'No offence Anna, but English girls are just too confident'
Anil on Western women in general: 'I like Western women more than Indian women, but I have to marry an Indian woman. Western women great for romance.'
Anil on modern medicine: ;you know that the urine of the cow will cure everything, stomach pains, cancer... it's very good. I don't drink it though.'
Anil on world politics: 'If India went to war with America, India would win because we have more people.'
Anil on the British Raj: 'The British did nothing for India except build the first railway. The rest has come after the British left.'
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Jaipur is a nice city and we stayed there for 2 nights. It's called the Pink City becuase of the dusty pink colour of its buildings and you get a really good view of it from both Amber Fort and Tiger Fort. At sunset it was lovely to be high above it, listening to the call to prayers from the mosque and hearing the hustle and bustle of the city below.
The city Palace complex is very impressive, beautifully decorated walls and doorways. We wandered around and saw the two largest silver vessels in the world - huge great urns that Maharajah Madho Singh II used to take holy Ganges water to England when he visited. He didn't trust the English water apparently...!
We spent the whole of the following day in the car driving to Udaipur. We got to see so much of rural India on this tour, it was very interesting to see all the sheep & goat herders, the women working in the fields and men still using ox-drawn ploughs.
