Day 2: 23 November – Jaipur

(sitting in the courtyard garden of the hotel at dusk, with a pot of tea)

Photo of the day: the Monsoon Gate at the City Palace, Jaipur

We got into Delhi on time at 3.45am and the airport was a lot easier than expected: immigration and customs were nothing like the hassle I thought they would be. The Doctor changed money and got a bundle of 100 100-rupee notes (I don't think he counted them). We met our driver and emerged into a cool (13 degrees) hazy Delhi night, with the smoke and smell of burning charcoal.

It's about 250km from Delhi to Jaipur, and for the first couple of hours we drove through the night while I tried to doze, waking up every 20 seconds as the car almost plunged into the truck in front and I felt the blood draining from my feet. By dawn we had stopped at the town of Behror, about half way where we got out and I had my first taste of chai – flavoured with cardamon. It came out of a machine (Nestea), it was hot and milky and a bit sweet. Lovely.

By the time we got to Jaipur I had got the measure of road sense here – driving is certainly “assertive” here but the really amazing thing is the variety of traffic in the roads. In Jaipur on the streets we saw all sorts of cars, jeeps, vans, buses, cycle and auto-rickshaws, motorbikes (some with families of four on them); but also camels, oxen, donkeys and elephants (yes!) in active service, together with various animals wandering around by themselves: goats, a pig, dogs and monkeys, and of course the cows. Of course I knew that cows were sacred but not really appreciated how it means that cows tend to stand around in the middle of a busy street and moo – it is a bit disconcerting. Taking a roundabout with all of this happening was fantastic – basically it just means that you point your vehicle at where you are going and go for it.

After some sleep and lunch in a bit of a tourist-trap restaurant (but still very nice – apparently stuffed tomatoes is a Jaipur speciality) we went to one of the sights of Jaipur, the City Palace. This is a walled block of buildings built for the Maharajas, the rulers of Jaipur when it was a state. Like many other traditional buildings here, they are painted pink in honour of a visit many years ago. A couple of the most interesting things were: two huge silver urns – over 300kg each – that were made for a devout Maharaja who travelled to England in the 1900s and took Ganges Water in them for purity; and this picture from the courtyard showing one of the four gates representing each of the seasons. These peacocks represent the monsoon season (which takes the place of autumn).