Jaipur, Rajasthan, India

Trip Start Feb 26, 2008

Trip End Ongoing

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Where I stayed

Hotel Karni Niwas Jaipur

(Jaipur hotels)

Flag of India Jaipur, India
Thursday, April 17, 2008

We took the overnight train from Jaisalmer to Jaipur on Monday night. Arrived in Jaipur at 5am and after the usual hassle at the train station we got a tuk tuk to the hotel we wanted to stay in. Room was ok and cost just over E10 a night. We slept til around 10am then went for breakfast in McDonalds! We noticed the city was quite dirty and the people were as bad with the staring as in Mount Abu. It was too hot again during the day to do much so we just went to the train station and booked our tickets to Delhi for Thursday. An Irish girl called Mary from County Clare checked into the room next door to us. We spent the afternoon chatting to her. She had been traveling for 10 months already and she told us loads of good things about Nepal. Her and Lydia spent most of the day bitching about how much they hate Indian men. At sunset we climbed 2km to the top of a hill where the Tiger Fort lies. What a let down, the place is run down and neglected and we didn't even get to see the sunset because of the smog! The three of us went out for a meat dinner to a kebab house

Ladies Palace

. It was quite nice and not too expensive.
The next morning we got up early to go sight-seeing, shouldn't have bothered. The place really is a kip, there was nothing worth while to see. The one thing we were thinking would be good to see, the City Palace, was charging a hefty entrance fee but they had a display of photos taken from inside outside the palace. We had a look at the photos and decided it wasn't worth going in. We found out later in the day that Mary went in and said it was crap, more like paying in to see an overpriced shop, nothing but people trying to sell artwork, textiles etc. We were happy at her expense! So we went for a bit of shopping instead, went home for a nap, spent a while on the internet and went to Pizza Hut for lunch/dinner!
Met up with Mary again that evening and we went to Pizza Hut again, just for desert this time! On Thursday morning we just packed our bags and did nothing til we got our train at 6pm to Delhi - shouldn't have come to Jaipur, biggest let down so far, lets hope Delhi is better, at least there's loads of pubs there so if the city is crap we can just drink the time away!
By the way, we've decided to scrap the national park as the prices were ridiculous, E150 each for 2 nights, might not sound much but we're on a budget of E20 a day and living quite comfortably on that.

View from Tiger Fort

We've a national park in Nepal on our itinerary anyway so we'll probably just spend longer there now instead. Heard nothing but good things about it and its a lot cheaper too. We booked a flight from Varanasi to Kathmandu for Tues 22nd April. The flight will only take 35 minutes but to go by land would have taken 2 full days. It cost just over 100 Euro each but we think it is worth it.
We got the train to Dehli on Thursday. From the moment we got on the train we were given food non-stop. It started with a bottle of water then a fruit juice, fried vegetable burger with cheese sandwich, sweets, tea, tomato soup with bread sticks, 3 different curries, rice, bread, fruit, curd and ice-cream. The train journey was only 5 and a half hours long. We stopped eating after the tomato soup but the 2 fat kids beside us ate everything put in front of them. When they were handing out the curry 2 of the catering lads bumped into each other and knocked a whole curry all over me. My jeans were destroyed and i had to throw them out. One of the lads kept trying to wipe the curry from my crotch. They apologised a lot but I think if it happened to Lydia she would have blown a fuse!