From Pushkar we took our first taxi ride assuming this would be absolute luxury compared with the buses we'd seen racing around. We were wrong. We arrived in Bundi after a pretty awful journey. The roads were probably the worst either of us have ever been on and nobody told our driver what the white lines in the middle of the road are for. Anyway, we got there safely if a bit battered from all the bumps on the road. First impressions were not great. After the colours and lively atmosphere in Pushkar, Bundi seemed pretty drab and uninspiring. However, unbeknown to Chris he was about the experience what is still now (6 weeks later) one of his highlights of India.......the Rajisthani Pizza!.....Oh my word, what an experience. Basically, it's spicy vegetables wrapped in two nan breads then the whole thing deep fried! Brilliant. Anyway, that shouldn't really have been the highlight seeing as just after lunch that day we visited Bundi Palace. We paid the 1 pound 50p to have a guide for an hour and it was excellent. Learnt lots of interesting stuff that would be incredibly boring for you all to read about. Chris did also manage to persuade a rickshaw driver to let him sit in the front seat so he could have his photo taken so he was very excited.
Next we hopped back on the trusty train (we now love the trains) for a few hours down to Rajisthan's greatest fort in a place called Chittorgarh (pronounced shitor...ha ha that's a naughty word). It was amazing visiting so many massively impressive sights in such a small area. Em's favourite were Padmini's Palace which is a cute little place. Padmini was a princess that was so beautiful that some Maharaja dude invaded the city to kill her husband and take her for his bride. Bit of a bummer that he managed to take the city by force but she'd killed herself as an act of loyalty for her husband! Chris' favourite was the temple devoted to 'sky clad monks' socalled due to the fact that they run around naked all the time. We even had some gunky stuff put as a dot on our foreheads when we left one of the temples. Needless to say we were looking awesome, practically like locals. Our final stop of the fort tour was where we met Lakshmi (means Lucky). She was a 6 year old girl who had drawn some pictures of houses on scraps of paper. She eyed us up as we got out of the richshaw and went straight for the softy......Mrs Sutton. "You wanna buy postcard?"......"you are very beautiful". So we are now the proud owners of an original hand drawn (in blue biro) postcard. She was absolutely adorable....it was literally impossible to say no....even though it was a whopping 10 rupees (12p)! The smile on this little girls face when we handed the money over was priceless. The look on Em's face was pretty good too.....she really really wanted us to take her with us.
The only other thing worth noting from Chittorgarh was that we watched the full 120 minutes of Spurs brushing Burnley to one side in the Carling Coca Cola Rumelows Milk Cup. Sorry Ian, I'll never mention it again. ..... and we all know what happened in the final now.... 😞
