Day 6: The first Scam Attempt

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We woke up late, stayed in our room until the last possible moment when we signed out and ventured to the roof of the hotel to play cards for an hour. Once we were ready we ordered an Ola to take us to the train station.



We’re getting pretty good at this public transport stuff now. We know there’s a lot of people rushing to get infront of one another but we also know that the lovely people on the ticket booths are very sympathetic towards our polite nature. Granted none of them have seen me at half 1 in Fever Shrewsbury or they’d probably react differently.



Here’s the main talking point for the day. The bastard at the train station shop tried to scam me. Having meticulously over worried about these things I’d been all over the internet, as previously mentioned. The scam is that the person working the till sees a clearly foreign man waiting and presumes they have not remembered the value of the notes. He (in this case it was a bloke lets not get political here people) takes the note off the person before asking them what they want and then short changes you a large (for India) quantity, on the hope that you don’t notice, or don’t have the testicular fortitude to question it. Now obviously when this happened I did notice I was missing a 100 note so just left my hand draped over the counter. The man kept looking at me suspiciously and I just said “200.” Chuckling to himself, the man reached into the drawer and gave me another hundred. Cheeky that.



The train journey to Jaipur was 4 and a half hours and we’d organised a pick up, however, we had no idea where as the conversation had been done via e-mail and there was no way to confirm the location with no internet. This meant we had to wade through the swarm of taxi drivers and tuk tuk drivers to the pre-pay. Our tuk tuk driver was a friendly bloke named Imran. It was apparent very early on that Imran, for his vibrancy and colloquial nature, was definitely going to try and sell us a day in his tuk tuk at the end of this journey. And that he did. For 670 rupees (£8.50) he was going to take us all over Jaipur, wherever we wanted to go (although we were sure that this meant it was a set trip to certain places.). We had been against this initially but the loveable rogue won us over. Go on then Imran.



We were staying at Hathroi Palace (not a palace) a hostel next to Hathroi fort. This was the cheapest of our Indian stays, but we have a private room and although bucket shower made a sneaky reappearance, we were tired and were just happy to have somewhere to lie down. The hostel has a rooftop restaurant which we decided to try. We had Aloo tamatar (potato and tomatoes in a spicy sauce) which takes top spot on the food list so far (sorry Kathi). Although not as spicy as it had let on it was very smooth and had an unusual flavour. We began to understand why the place was so cheap when the exceedingly chatty staff began shovelling us with beer (we later found out they were 150 rupees a pop which adds up pretty quick) which we were convinced probably accounts for 85% of the profit margin.



It was only 9pm but we were nackered and had a post breakfast date with Imran the Tuk Tuk man 10am so we slunk off to bed.



Steps: 4000 (tired mate)



Bites: 8



Photos with foreigners: 6



Scams score: Joe and Meg 1-0 Asian Subcontinent



Top Tip: Always ask how much the beer is before necking one.

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