Jaipur

Date arrived: 22nd November 2023

Date Departed: 29th November 2023

Favourite sight: Hawa Mahal (Palace of the Wind)

Average Cost: £26.28 PPPD

Jaipur! The pink city! So many fabulous palaces and buildings, the shining capital of Rajasthan is not only a major tourist draw, but a thriving commercial hub for international trade and crafts. We found much to love here, but also much that embodied the challenges India faces as a nation, as we battled daily with smog and pollution of all kinds.

22nd November 2023

We left Jodhpur on our Chair Car train for a journey of just over 5 hours to Jaipur. We were a little unlucky on this train, as we ended up on the central row of seats, which have a table inbetween two rows, rather than the airline style seats that make up the rest of the carriage. Whilst you get a table, this gives you significantly less legroom - and it was a very full train! We did spend much of the triip talking to a dutch chef, who was taking a month's holiday to solo-travel around the north of India - and trying to do so without a phone. I could imagine this being a real challenge in modern times!

We also experimented with ordering food to the train, which seems to be a commonly done thing here on the very long train journeys. We ordered a simple veg thali, but it worked very well, and a guy was waiting on the platform to hand me our tray of food as planned. We will definitely use this service again!

Arriving at the incredibly busy JaipurJunction station just after 9PM, we found a tuk-tuk to our acccommodation, and endured a ride through the (very) busy city. 

Our accommodation - called Chillout Hotel - was midway between a hostel and hotel, with a very relaxed atmosphere, befitting the name. The room was nice however, with clean bedding and towels, and a little balcony overlooking ths treet below. The property had a rooftop restaurant where we ate a lovely dinner pretty much as soon as we arrived!

23rd November 

No water available when we woke up this morning, so we slung on some clothes and went upstairs for breakfast. This was really good, as we had a decent allowance against the menu included in our room, and one of the managers was quite happy to share his pride and joy coffee machine and make us excellent Americanos to start the day. As the restaurant was pure veg, however, that meant no eggs. The crepes and french toast on the menu were therefore not available, but substituting chappatis for pancakes worked surprisingly well. We were served an amazing bowl of fresh fruit with our chappancakes, which even I enjoyed,

Water fixed, we enjoyed a warm shower, and decided to set off down to the old town to do a self-guided walking tour from good-old Lonely Planet. We managed to find a tuk-tuk down to the centre, and discovered that the local election, occurring in two-days, was causing quite a lot of traffic, with everything from parades of tuk-tuks, to brass marching bands, and even the odd elephant being used to promote the candidates. Somehow, they managed to make India even noisier than usual!

We walked the perimeter of the old town, which was India's first planned city, built in the early 18th century by a far-sighted Mahorajah using a grid system. This gave us good bearings, although it was, as is often the case in India, quite a challenging walk.

We enjoyed lunch at a small rooftop restaurant overlooking one of the new metro stations, and I had an Indian pizza. This comprised pizza components - bread, tomato, cheese and veg - all mixed up in a cup. It tasted good, but was a bit of an odd concoction!

We decided to walk back to our accommodation, passing the very impressing Hawa Mahal, or Palace of the Winds. This is the whimsical looking pink palace shown at the top of this page, and often used as an illustration of India's magnificent architecture. It's quite strange to see such a fabulous building sorrounded by shops, cafes and markets, hard up against an insanely busy main road. You always imagine it would be in the middle of a park or something!

Anyway - the walk back was fairly tortuous, but we got there in the end and had a nice sit down to recover!

Of course, we don't learn. We found a restaurant to try for dinner that was about a kilometre away, and decided to walk there. Why! Why don't we learn! As well as a fairly busy road with no footpaths, there were also various political rallies going on, which meant we needed to dodge past loads of parked mopeds and lots of groups of people, making the walk even harder than usual! 

We did enjoy a nice dinner however, and managed to survive the walk back to the hotel as well. All of this experience just adding to our ability to 'cope with' India. That said, I think this was another night where I expressed some concerns about whether I could manage another three months!

24th November

Elephants! This was a day I'd been looking forwad to for a few weeks, ever since we'd arranged a trip out to the Elefantastic Elephant sanctuary, where they look after rescued working elephants, and give them a safe way of earning their keep. There are plenty of ways of interacting with elephants in Jaipur, but most of them involve riding them as tranport, which is generally considered to be bad for them. Elefantastic is a bit different.

After another excellent breakfast at Chillout, we were picked up in a fancy 4x4, and driven out to the Elefantastic site, about 12KM out of the town centre. Here we were welcomed with a cold drink and we could see several other small groups walking with and feeding beautiful, big, but calm-looking elephants. We quickly realised we would have our own elephant for the day, which was a very pleasant surprise, and were shortly introduced to Billie, a 28 year old cow.

It was explained to us that elephants have poor eyesight, so staying very close to Billie and touching her, and talking to her was important. This was so she could smell us, feel us, and hear our voices, to get used to us. We spent about half an hour feeeding Billie sugar cane, which her mahout was breaking up and passing to us. He told us a bit about elephants in general, Billie in particular, and also Elefantastic whilst we were feeding, stroking and hugging her. 

After giving her almost 30KG of sugar cane (she eats over 200KG per day!) we spent a bit of time beautifying her, painting her head and legs with carefully prepared natural paints. We could tell from her reactions that she was quite comfortable, as she leaned in to us for hugs and happily let us dab the bright coloured paints on to her skin.

The two hours we spent with Billie was truly memorable and one of the most relaxing and calming experiences of my life.

After our walk we gave her water - which she slurped up into her trunk from a hosepipe and then sprayed into her mouth to drink - fortunately not all over us! We then helped to wash off the paint that we'd applied, cleaning her up and massaging her thick wrinkly hide as we did so!

After our time with Billie we were taken to a family home in nearby Amber, where we were fed a genuinely delicious vegetarian lunch, with piping hot fresh rotis, dal, a paneer curry and rice. We were also given a lovely sweet rice-pudding type of dessert called Keer, which I in particular enjoyed. We were then taken back to our hotel - thoroughly refreshed and energised from a wonderful day at Elefantastic!

25th November

Well this was a boring day. It turns out on the day of the state elections, pretty much everything is closed! We even tried a couple of local gyms, which we thought would be keen to take advantage of a non-working day for civil servants, but no, closed as well.

We did get to a very nice restaurant for dinner though, and enjoyed a couple of bottles of beer :-)

26th November

Today we went up the road to Amber, which was the old capital of the region prior to the building of Jaipur. TheAmber Palace is a fabulous fort and palace complex on top of a hill, and we very much enjoyed several hours exploring this. On the way we visited the Jal Mahal, a half-sunken palace in a lake part-way betweem Jaipur and Amber. Unfortunately the sheer thickness of smog prevented us from getting any good pictures of the palace, but I did take a few of the roadside where people stop to take their snaps. It's genuinely a little bit frightening!

We also worked our way through the busy streets of the town to visit the Anokhi Museum of hand printing. This is another of those sights where the museum content is super interesting, but so is the building itself - in this case a restored 15th Century Haveli. We learned lots about block printing techniques, and even got to try it out ourselves - I have a new and somewhat eclectically coloured handkerchief as a result!

27th November

We visited Jaipur's Central Museum today, the Albert Hall Museum, which was very good. Stunning architecture, as well as a fascinating set of exhibits, including an egyptian mummy! From here we went to a government souvenir shop, which was also quite interesting as it gave us an idea of what 'fair' prices were for some artifacts. It was very dangerous as we could easily have ended up with a new dining table, storage trunk, and multiple ornaments and paintings! Discipline was required.

Wandering roud Jaipur was again quite challenging, and we actually ended up back at the Pink Heart restaurant for lunch, where we'd been two days ago.  From here we visited a sculpture gallery inside one of the new metro stations, which had some pretty cool exhibits, and also quite a few pictures of Jaipur from around the time of the Prince of Wales's visit in 1877. It was for this visit that Jaipur was painted pink - a traditional colour of welcome - and it has since remained that colour. In fact, it is the law that all buildings in the old city must be the same shade of pink!

The museum ticket we had actually allowed us entry to another couple of places, including the lovely pink Hawa Mahal (see banner picture) - but unfortunately we missed their 4.30 closing time, so we retreated back to Chillout.

We went back to Hawk View for dinner again tonight as we'd really enjoyed the food there, and did so again! This time we were more prepared for the walk there and back, so it was a little less painful.

28th November

For our last day in Jaipur we decided to look around the City Palace. There seemed to be a lot of preparation going on here for some kind of event, possibly a very big wedding, but there were lots of tables being set up, along with flowers and what looked like extensive food preparation stations. If it was a wedding, it was a big one, and with one heck of a venue!

The palace itself was magnificent, and had a few separate galleries of arms and armour, paintings, and textiles, which we enjoyed, as well as the main throne room. Possibly our favourite part was a courtyard called Pitam Nivas Chowk. This courtyard has four fabulous gates, each representing a diferent season. 

We ate lunch at a restaurant within the palace complex, and it was interesting to note that, whilst the main palace open to the public is extensive, there are large areas beyond this that appear to have been abandoned, and are inhabited by monkeys and dogs.

For dinner we had our penultimate meal at Chillout, and enjoyed the slightly sporadic, but well intentioned and enthusiastic service there! We made sure we were all packed up and ready to go in the morning.

29th November

A final breakfast at Chillout, and then a tuk-tuk to the mega-busy Jaipur Junction railway station. Today we left Jaipur for what we felt might be ahighlight of the trip - Ranthambore National Park!