Jaipur: No, not this way! Not this way!

Jaipur’s a very large city. Not on par with Delhi or Mumbai, or even Bangalore, but still much larger than the other cities we visited. It still had lots of cool stuff, but for as calm as Udaipur was, Jaipur was intense.

In addition to being very dirty, dusty, and sooty, it was the most aggressive city towards tourists. As we sat at the train station on our arrival, we waited for the free car to come pick us up from our hotel (this is common–the place was not expensive). As we waited, no less than 7 rickshaw drivers absolutely hounded us, talking about how awful our hotel was. As it turned out, our hotel was great–it just doesn’t pay commissions to rickshaw drivers who drop off tourists just looking for hotels. As the stay wore on, we honestly couldn’t go 15 seconds without some yahoo coming up to us to say "My friend, my friend, please come look at my store," or "my friend, my friend, where are you going? I’ll drive you." If you replied, they’d follow you and refuse to take no for an answer. If you ignored, they’d snap at you for being rude. I know they were the ones being rude, but it still was quite taxing for this to happen constantly.



In Bangalore, the rickshaws are metered, but that wasn’t the case anywhere else on this trip. Jaipur was the #1 city for rickshaw haggling. Because the tourist destinations were mostly on hills, they rightfully expected some extra pay for that. Further, since most were somewhat out of the way, the standard was to pay a rickshaw to drive you there, wait, and drive you back. This all made the process quite complex, and took the power of knowledge out of our hands. For one trip, though, we wound up with a pretty nice guy who agreed to drive us to a fort and back for Rs.300 (still a rip-off, but not THAT much of one). He chatted us up quite a bit, telling us about his other job as an English teacher, and about his kids. It could’ve been all bogus, but he seemed nice and wasn’t really pressing much else on us. When we got back, though, we asked him to drop us off at a restaurant a few blocks away, and he wanted Rs.350 because of that. When we balked, souring the end of this long day, he exclaimed "No, not this way! Not this way!" He didn’t want our relationship to end on such a note. We were friends! We still had to pay the 350, though.



Anyway, Jaipur DID have cool stuff. There were three forts, Amber Fort being the largest. Some movie was filming while we were there, so one pavilion was taken over by a dance sequence being shot. Based on the moustaches, it seemed like the standard fare of "evil prince kidnaps helpless hot chick; random women dance in the background." The fort itself was huge, and not explorable in any coherent fashion. Lots of wandering through rooms and stumbling upon ancient latrines. Some of the rooms were oddly reminiscent of boss rooms in Zelda–big open squares with some pillars at one side, followed by a small dead-end room (that’s where the silver bow is, right?).




Beyond that, Jaipur had a really cool ancient observatory called Jantar Mantar, full of huge ancient sundials and stargazing charts. One sundial was accurate to 2 seconds. We also got to check out the Monkey Temple, which sadly was not run exclusively by a society of monkeys. On Pete’s suggestion, we took the second half Rs. 10 bag of monkey food and just heaved it at a group of monkeys (MONKEY BOMB!). As expected, shit took off.



Traveler’s note: food in Jaipur was sketchy. The larger the town, the harder it is to find that one good place. We relied heavily on the guidebook, which was dated and composed largely of places that had since jacked up their prices. I recommend doing some research on places to eat before going. Museum cafes only work on a certain level.

Escalator to nowhere:



Next up was Jaisalmer, a desert city.

Tags: Rajasthan