Jaipur

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Umaid Bhawan

The pre-monsoon heat in Rajasthan makes June part of the low season, when it's easy to score half-price deals on classy hotels that the Rajas in the palaces would have ordered a dozen of their concubines slaughtered just to stay in for a night. Having three sets of eyes on us during the delicious buffet breakfast - ready to leap to meet any of our needs - made it challenging to slide parathas, etc. into our hidden lunch containers.

Running in Jaipur?

The Collectorate Circle Park has only one thing in common with the old A.E. O’Block Junior High School track: 5 times around equals about one mile. It's in the middle of a 5-10 lane traffic circle (depending on the vehicles currently in it), making access as difficult as putting your hand in and out of a spinning fan blade. Each time, I waited for a human shield to cross and shadowed a couple of meters behind him. A cow would have worked even better, but cows are too intelligent to cross such intersections. The nice thing about this beleaguered park is that since this is the only way to access it, there are hardly any people there, aside from some homeless people brushing their teeth with leaves from a certain tree, and yet the park is nicely manicured and mostly shaded.

The Old City

The plan was to take a tuk-tuk to one of the gates of the old City and do a self-guided walking tour from sight to sight. The old cities of Dubrovnik, Quito, Cordoba, Cairo, Dubai, Bogotá, etc. have narrow, winding streets that lead nowhere, making them excellent for walking and exploring. Jaipur's Old City, in contrast, is just the chaos and filth of the rest of the city compressed into a smaller, crumbling space, and then exported to the Internet in Technicolor. The markets were interesting enough, but all my energy was diverted to the act of stepping- not stepping into traffic or people, on unidentifiable brown substances at least partially comprised of some manner of feces, on rusty metal sticking up out of the ground, in puddles of raw sewage, etc. Wearing sandals is also not recommended.

The New City

The suburbs of Jaipur, especially near Central Park, the university, and the airport, have well-paved roads, sidewalks that aren't just used for parking, manicured medians, and even green spaces! Some would say these areas lack character, like suburbs anywhere, which makes me think 'character’ is just a euphemism for variety, or more cynically, chaos. Normally I prefer organically developed towns and cities over communist planning or suburbia (which basically look the same, except that one is the poor and one bans the poor), but in India I can only handle the suburbs, where there's no need to recite this haiku I wrote one night in the safety of my room:

OMFG
I can't believe we weren't killed
By a car today.

Cooking Class

Peggy and I ventured out to the suburbs to take a private cooking class in the home of Payal Biyani. After she took us to the markets to learn about grains, spices, and using in-season fruits and veggies, we returned to her house to learn to make biryani, chapati, paratha, and an amazing base for paneer curry, all from scratch. She adapted to meet all our needs and is a passionate teacher.

Choosing Tuk-Tuk Travel over Uber, Taxis

Uber is dirt cheap in India, so we used it pretty often, except at airport taxi stands where the union runs the show. Taxis are about double the cost, but tuk-tuks are about the same price as Uber, but with more of a local feel, sans the danger of stepping into something. Walking out of the hotel is like walking out of a building in a zombie movie. After dodging the initial taxi offers, it looks clear, but then one, and then another notices you and starts speeding your way, until you're warding them off in all directions. But once you choose one and agree on a price, they are friendly and informative, though I just nodded throughout the journey, pretending to hear his concoction of history over the honking and motors. Their expert weaving through every obstacle imaginable is the main event. A 40-minute round trip to the Amber Palace, including the driver waiting there for 3 hours to take us back, was still under 10 USD, even with a tip.

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Photos

From the Amber Palace
The gap between the hills is basically the only way invaders could approach.

Old City Scene
Peggy insisted she saw the dog move, or maybe he was playing dead to avoid the monkeys that had taken over the area on the other side of the street.

Hawa Majal
Not included: the other 4 senses.

The biggest cannon in the world
According to some guy in a uniform who wouldn't leave us alone... he had some latent Freudian complex if you ask me.

Comments

[D MJ Binkley]

Cooking class
Never enough cooking classes! We try to take classes when we travel. Looks good.