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Published: April 3rd 2008
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A relaxing afternoon train ride delivered us to the edge of the Rajasthan desert in the so-called “Pink City” of Jaipur. I did my best to spend most of my time “dogging” my head out of the open doors and windows on the train to get pictures and peeks of the growing number of camels and sandy towns as we made our approach. Rozy held her position on the train bench fielding the many questions thrown her way…Indian? You look like Indian, no? From India? I think you are Indian? …and so on and so forth. The train ride was mostly smooth with the only sign of aggression coming from a ticket taker who repeatedly slapped another grown man in the head for not buying a ticket for the ride…it seemed a rather childish way for the ticket taker to get his point across, but hey, this is India and anything is possible. So, as I was saying, we arrived.
We played the usual game of “Ignore the Rickshaw Drivers”, until, they became overly aggressive and started touching us. In usual form, Rozy would snap at them, they would back off and get a bit angry, then, ask her if
she was Indian…nothing new, and, quite honestly, this sequence of events is expected now. We hopped into our pre-paid rickshaw, the driver asked me “Where you are going?” then turned to Rozy and asked, “Indian?” and we were on our way. After 2 failed attempts at securing lodging for the evening, we finally shacked down at the decadent Hotel Kalyan. The hotel check-in procedure was par for the course and included the passport scanning, gigantic book entry, and the question for Rozy, “Indian?”. A short while later we found ourselves setting up in our room and pondering the massive hole in the wall, and, how we planned to plug it in order to achieve privacy. Privacy came by way of stuffing the hole with blankets and bags and soon we were off in search of food and adventure in our new town.
A short cycle-rickshaw ride over to the Old City in Jaipur revealed a disturbing fact about the Pink City…it isn’t pink by a long shot. I think we must have had a vision of Easter Bunny pink or like Pink Panther pink or something because when we got to gate of the old city, Rozy and I
quickly came to the agreement that the predominant colour was brownish-orange. Dismayed by the lack of pink, we strolled Old City and chatted up flower salesmen, gobbled jalebi, and snapped photos of people stocking up on colored powder for the Holi celebration kicking off the following day. Towers of powdered color lined the streets as vendors measured plastic baggies full of the stuff, selling it to both kids and adults in copious quantities. The atmosphere was anxious and the people walked cautiously as the clocked ticked towards the inevitability of arrival of the first day of Spring.
The next day started off like most apart from the fact that no businesses were open (including restaurants) and people seemed to be just roaming around and going nowhere in particular. Now, we realized it was Holi and that means public holiday, however, we didn’t think that EVERYTHING would be shut…nevermind….we strolled along to enjoy the morning and take in the city. In festive spirit, we accepted a red swash of powder upon our foreheads by a gentleman passerby and felt as if we were blending in and playing an active role in the holiday…this was the beginning of the end for
us.
I thought it would be a good idea to purchase my own bags of colored powder so that I could return the favor to anyone who decided to powder us in the street. The next person with whom we played Holi took things a step further and swiped powder all across our necks. Unknowingly, we had taken yet another step towards the Holi free-for-all that seemed to rule for anyone with more than just a little speck of color on the head. Soon after swipe #2, people seemed to crawl out of the woodwork in order to have a go with the foreigners playing Holi in the streets. Grown men doused us with many colors of powder and kids kept upping the ante by squirting colored water, smearing color paste on our faces and snatching our color bags from our hands. Eventually our ability to control the amount of water and color that was flying our way was virtually impossible, and, this was only 10:30 in the morning.
As the aggressiveness of the kids pushed to greater heights, we decided that it was in our (and our belongings) best interest to only play Holi for the first
half of the day. We had heard in Varanasi that Holi crowds can get rather drunk and rowdy and we weren’t looking for such trouble. Completely breaded in a colorful crust of powder, we headed for Kalyan where the manager deemed us too disgusting to enter our room and forced us to shower in a “special room” for exceptionally dirty people. After achieving our new state of cleanliness, we decided to spend the rest of the afternoon relaxing at the guesthouse and avoiding the Technicolor madness swirling around the city. Relaxation only lasted for about an hour before I became violently ill (damn Chicken Tikka Masala) and redecorated the floor of the bathroom at the Kalyan Hotel, room 101. I vowed to write off meat for at least a week which only ended up lasting for about a 1/2 day; I don’t know how vegetarians do it.
For our final day in Jaipur, we made a valiant attempt to plan a busy day of sightseeing, however, I was still feeling ill and didn’t have the energy to be whipped around in a tuk-tuk all afternoon. Instead, we ate chicken sandwiches in McDonalds and checked into the local cinema for
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All up, we didn’t have the opportunity to see much in Jaipur (as I was ill), and, that which we did see (the Pink City and the palace therein) was sort of “ho-hum” and not really that exciting….oh well, it happens, next stop, Mumbai.
STATISTICS
- Flights taken = 8
- Intercity trains rides taken = 12
- Intercity bus rides taken = 29
- Times lost = 16
- Total instances of diarrhea = 6
- Total number of requests for pictures with Daniel = 9
- Total megabytes of pictures taken = 25,105
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jim
non-member comment
jaipur is a great place
enjoyed reading your blog. will be looking forward to more. I was in Jaipur sept 07, and loved every minate of it