Jostling Jaipur

Blog by Em. Comments by Ian in blue

The last couple of days have been tiring and mad, but extremely good fun. We stayed at the Jaipur Inn for two nights which is about 15 mins walk to the entrance of the city wall. Jaipur is a walled city in the state of Rajasthan (population 2.3 million) and is sometimes known as the pink city because of the dusky pink wall and buildings.

After not sleeping too well on our journey from Udaipur, the first day is a bit frustrating as we're both very tired. We do nothing much apart from wander round the outskirts of the city taking pictures (we seem to have a good collection now!) and trying to find the city palace (and all the locals send us in different directions so it takes us about 3 hours!!!)

The detour around the outskirts is really nice as we get to see a lot of locals just living their lives and get some good pictures to boot. However on more than one occasion we feel a bit like the Pied Piper and end up being followed by a dozen or more excited young kids. It got to the point where we didn't know what to do to get rid of them. I did notice that they kept trying to touch Em's watch so she decided to do the wise thing and take it off. The horrible thing is that you start to suspect everyone given the scams that your read about in the Lonely Planet.

The lack of sleep probably resulted in our two minor panics...firstly, whilst loading up photos I managed to pick up a virus on my memory card and subsequently the USB stick I was saving pictures to. Hopefully I haven't lost any pics!

...and guess what..I end up being chief geek and have to install anti-virus software on the internet machines. It was a good job as one of the machines was riddled with viruses. And Em got roped into writing some house rules for the hotel as they seemed to like us!

The second panic was when Ian lost his day sack (think of this as your life in a bag when you're travelling...passport, tickets, money, camera, ipod, blackberry). In typical bloke style, I thought he probably hadn't looked properly, but he swore blind he'd left it in the internet room at the hotel and got the manager of the hotel involved over the loss!...Eventually found the bag just where he'd left it when we had dinner two hours previous!

OK, I'm a bloke and suffer from bloke-blindness!! :-)

Anyway, day two was much better and we both had a great day shopping, taking photos and fighting our way through the hundreds of people that stop us each day (you won't believe how many times I say "hello" in one day...getting a bit sick of it now!)

My best purchase of the day is the most amazing highly sequined and emroidered wall hanging (about 1.5m x 1m) bartered down from £60 to £20. I love it!

The worst thing about the purchase was that all of the shopkeepers saw us with a bag showing that we had already made another purchase so they were even keener to get us into their shops to show us their wares.

The funniest thing has to be Em in her element when she meets a guy trying to sell Indian sweets who's studying pharmacy and wants to come to the UK. Em took great delight in explaining all about Chemist + Druggist and Search Medica :-)

Patrick...I hope you're paying attention...all the marketing I'm doing, even when I'm not at work!!! I haven't forgotten my appraisal is on the 16th December!!!

Although the poverty is obviously a huge problem here, the people seem genuinely happy with life and are always smiling. It's amazing how a few pence makes all the difference. Last night we took a tuk-tuk to a restaurant and it cost just 1.50 (inc tip!), for the man to take us, wait outside whille we had dinner and then drive us back. He was very sweet and it made me sad to think how little these people have.

Ian and I have been marking the country out of ten as we go along....my rating has definitely reached 10...it's one of the most amazing places I've been to and I'm sure I'll want to come back again!

There's a strange heirarchy here on the bus front. The private bus company that runs the buses to Delhi have three classes - The Volvo, A/C and Deluxe. We end up getting the deluxe which is more than adequate as Em says.

We get to the bus station and do not have quite enough money to get the two bus tickets as our hotel would not accept credit cards and we ended up using nearly all our cash. We decide there must be an ATM nearby so see if we can find it before we buy tickets...it's the State Bank...nightmare...for some reason this bank does not accept international cards...5 minutes later we find Punjab bank...that doesn't take international cards either...eventually we've missed the bus we wanted to get but have found an ATM and get the next bus at 11am.

So sadly we leave Jaipur behind and head for Delhi on our 'deluxe' bus for the six hour journey (bit of a bargain for £4 each!)

The journey actually is quite comfortable and the time passes quickly. We stop for 30 minutes at lunchtime and indulge in mcvities digestive biscuits, crisps, mars bar and ice cream...there does not seem to be much else to eat.

One thing that that I noticed on the news stand whilst we had lunch was a copy of Top Gear magazine - Jeremy Clarkson would be proud.

We arrive into the Delhi bus terminal at 5pm. It's just an hour before it gets dark so we want to get to our hotel. Things start to go downhill...we get told our hotel is 30km away...at first we think the tuk tuk driver is lying so we walk away. After asking a few people it seems he was right...2 hours later we get to our hotel!

I feel a bit miserable, partly because I'm tired but also because we've paid a lot for the hotel (eighty pounds a night) so to be so far from the centre is a bit of a pain. Additionally the tuk tuk driver quoted us 250 rupees and then tried to put the price up when we got to the hotel and we had to argue with him to get our change.

Well, before we wrap up we'll update you on the animals that we've seen in the cities that we've visited so far. Cats, Dogs, Mice, Rats, Squirrel-like creatures, Gecko, Chickens, Goats, Pigs, Cows, Camels, Elephants and Monkeys. We really can't work out the cow, goat and pig situation as they just seem to randomly wander the streets in pursuit of food scraps - god only knows if anyone owns them...?

Next blog to follow: Delhi