Jaipur, India

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Feb. 27, 2008

We left the camel camp this morning for the drive back to Jodhpur and our flight to Jaipur, Rajasthan, India.

Feb 28, 2008

Jaipur. We began our visit to Jaipur with a visit to the very large “Amber Fort” a short distance from the city. The ride up to the fort was on an elephant and was an adventure in itself. We have ridden elephants before but in this case the seat was facing sideways and is probably not the best way to sit on an elephant. It’s a short ride ( maybe 15 minutes ) to the top so it’s not a big issue.

We had a guided tour of the fort and some of the history involved in the building of this and the lives of the people who built it and the people who lived here a few hundred years ago. This was quite the lifestyle for the people of influence. All of the forts and palaces have their own special character as they were commisioned by different rulers who all had their own ideas on how things should look. Some are red sandstone and some are more white marble. The stone carving is spectacular in all cases. Some of these took generations to build.

Our afternoon tour included the city palace ( and museum ) and a visit to Jantar Mantar, a very old “observatory”, that was used to watch the stars etc. and was important for the astrologers of the day. The whole system was pretty sophisticated considering how old it is.

I suspect there are few cities in the world where on a daily basis you can see, in a 50 meter stretch of the main road in downtown, working camels, elephants, bullocks, donkeys, horses, water buffalo, assorted cows on the loose and too many cyclos and motorcycles. This is really a sensory overload with all the traffic and markets.

This concluded our visit to Jaipur. An interesting place to visit. Our trip tomorrow will be a 5 hour drive to Agra, the home of the Taj Mahal.

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