Enjoyably Hectic in Jaipur
We had three days in Jaipur. We had a pretty nice time in fact. And not just because I was able to watch England vs. West Indies live on telly every evening. BRILLIANT.
First day, we went up to Amber Fort. Easy to get to by bus from the city centre (although getting to the city centre was not so straightforward, as I’ll mention later on).
Amber is really nice. Firstly there is a palace at the bottom of the hill with all the usual palacey courtyards and screens, and little museum pieces and things. And then there is the big fort further up the hill. The fort has amazing views down to the palace and across the countryside. The fort also contains the world’s largest cannon on wheels. It is really big. Although with a 35km range, I’m not really sure how accurate it would be. There were also lots of nice monkeys up there. It would seem that Rajasthan has two sorts of monkey, nice natured ones with long tails, and bad natured ones that look a bit like ASBO kids. That jump out of trees to raise their eyebrows at you.
We rushed back into town on the bus so that we could meet up with a nice tuk-tuk boy (yes they do exist) who was taking us out to a cultural/dining experience that we had read about in our guide book. It took nearly an hour by rickshaw to get there, and it was indeed very strange. There were concrete tigers and dinosaurs and lion and a fake cave, and camel rides, and a tiny lake with a rowing boat on and ladies balancing pots on their heads, and a human powered ferris wheel, and a magician, and candy floss, and a big dart board, and a shooting gallery. And then you got your traditional Rajasthani food, with obligatory turbans to be borrowed. But even with all this excitement it seems that the best things for many of the (definitely not drunk) groups of Indian boys was for them to rush up to us asking for ’1 snap’ and shaking us by the hand and asking us for our good name and so on, in a typically Indian way. And these were not little boys, most must have been about 25 or something.
Now Jaipur is a town of bad auto-rickshaw drivers, they are big meanies. Almost all of them. Firstly they charge you lots of money, and as they are all in cahouts you can’t get a better price by asking around. Secondly they don’t take you where you want to go. Even pretending to be lost on the main road into town, so that they can take you somewhere that will pay them lots of commission. In fact found a scam of our own that you can use to save yourselves some money when in Jaipur. Get in a rickshaw in the hotel part of town and ask to go to Anhoki Shop. A posh shop that has branches in England, that crucially doesn’t give commission to drivers. Now the driver won’t take you there, and he will pretend that there is a one way system, or he is lost or whatever for a while until he gets you to the shop of his choice which will be in the centre of town. At which point we got out, and told him (for the tenth time) that he was going the wrong way and we weren’t going to pay him. So we didn’t, and he drove off.
One other scam they ran on us was that when we ask the normal price for a tuk-tuk for a 2km ride they refused, but told us that the non-english speaking cyclo rider would take us instead. We got to near our destination (the tuk-tuk drivers had told our chap to go to the wrong hotel of course) and we it came to payment time it seems that the tuk-tuk drivers had informed out poor cyclo rider that we would pay WAY over the odds for the journey, so when we handed over the correct amount he was a little annoyed. Of course we paid up anyway, as the cyclo riders are some of the worst of in Indian society, they seem to work pretty long hours and when they stop you see lots of them sleeping under flyovers or on street corners, a really hard life.
After our exciting night of culture we ventured into the tourist attractions of Jaipur itself. The palace museum was okay. Nothing too exciting in their except a pair of giant urns that the Mararjha had made for transporting holy water to England with him for his trip to visit the queen. I’m not sure how they lifted the, as presumably he didn’t take an elephant with him too. More exciting for Alex and I (as scientific types) was the observatory containing the world’s largest compass. The shadow on the ground moves at a rate of 1 second per mm. As you can see from the photo, it is very big. There were other instruments for determining star signs and astrological charts for working out important dates in people’s lives, all very well made, and surprisingly well preserved for things around 250 years old.
Jaipur is good for shopping too, although we only seemed to buy stuff by accident. We went into shops just to see what they had, and made them silly offers (like a pair of shoes which started at 950, and we offered 200, explaining that we didn’t want to buy them at this price, we wanted to look around more first). So we walked out the shop as the price came down and down and eventually they shoes were wrapped up and pretty much thrown at us, in exchange for the 200 price we offered. We also bought a wall hanging and some other stuff using a similar technique, I can only assume that Jaipur traders start their prices a little high…
