An Exercise in Irrelevance

Outside the Hotel le Roi is a messy street, but inside it’s nice. The drive here was hectic and smelly, with many miles of crawling through traffic. Not nice at all. We had another near accident when a lorry in the lane next to us lost a tyre and the car was hit with large chunks of Rubber.

We came from the Taj Mahal. It’s been described in detail by many others; the sunlight scintillates of the marble facade, leaving you speechless; but, not if it’s foggy. Despite this, it is a magnificent building and visiting it is well worth while. I guess nothing can quite live up to is reputation once it becomes a world icon.

Just had to phone reception. The room heating controls don’t work, with the room getting colder and colder, so they have bought up a fan heater.

And that’s it; tomorrow, we go to the airport and fly home.

We started off today at the Amber fort in Jaipur. For some reason, the hawking here seems particularly heavy, a theme that was to continue. The Amber fort, though, is magnificent — it’s a labyrinth of connecting rooms, built through the walls of several connecting courtyards. Strange for me, the most interesting bit was the latrines (historical, not modern day, I hasten to add) and the water system. They had underground storage facilities, a system for elevating the water. In general, though I had a great time wandering through the rooms, finding new places.

After that we drove to a Agra Fort; we were short of time, but we managed to see much of it — the rooms were strange, over built over several levels. Finally, we saw the mosque at the back with relentless hawking, including demands for money in exchange for shoe guarding.

Finally a hellish journey into Agra — it was foggy and polluted, worse in the cold snap I suspect than normal. The driver didn’t know his way, and his relentless stopping resulted in a bike crashing into this rear end; minor injuries, fortunately, no worse. We finally got to the Garden Villas guest house, where we were staying. This was inside a drab, gated community, but inside the rooms were good with a warm welcome and an excellent, home-cooked curry. No complaints there.

As a city Jaipur is like many that we have been too — busy, polluted and unattractive, and also very in-your-face; yes, thank you, I am sure that are many elephants, but I still don’t want your tuk-tuk. We did see the Jantar Mantar observatory. This is a magnificent place, full of angles and careful measurements — Jai Singh thought that bigger was better. Each instrument had a careful description, telling you what it measured and what this measurement was for; although the signs kept of mixing up “accuracy” and “resolution” which bugged me a bit. The thing that confused me was that most of the instruments fall into two categories; those for measuring angles and sundials for measuring time. Time and space all sorted, it seems, but time only measurable during the day and space only measurable at night.

The city palace is okay; there are some good things inside, but it’s not as well done as Jodphur. The Wind Palace on the other hand is just a big building, but it’s fun to climb and the view from the top is great. Today is a saturday, and the place is full of tourists — many want to talk and I’ve been asked my name and photographed with many people. But the image that is going to stick in my mind are the kites circling overhead — hundreds of them fluttering in the wind, steered by intensely concentrating kids, perched on the sprawling rooftops. I have a grainy photograph which was the best I could do.

Finished off with dinner in the hotel cafe; the last time I had a curry with no spices at all was in Canada. That time, at least, it was served hot. If you stay in the Hotel Arya Niwas, well, avoid the food. Otherwise, it’s pretty nice.

The bus journey wasn’t that bad as it happened. The environmental conditions inside were okay; the heat disappeared pretty quickly; the temperature was nice till sundown, then I put more and more clothes on until I ran out. My feet got cold, but the rest of me was okay. The motion was a bit wierd and rolling, but in general I like travelling overnight and with horizontal. If there was some kind of night bus in the UK, I think that I’d take it pretty often; obviously I’d prefer something that wasn’t packed to the rafters and has some basic safety standards.

Oh, and a toilet.

The Aussies were made; the bus is squalid. There are seats and bunks. The posh option is a upper bunk over the seats, with sliding windows on both sides. The opposite side is a single bunk which is open. The seats are if you are really poor. The temperature inside the bus is rising from hot to, well, hotter. I have no idea what this must be like when we are not in the middle of a cold spell.

Turns out the seats are not if you are really poor; this is standing up. The bus is now heaving full of people on two different levels. Combined with the general madness that I’ve seen on the road, I would be nervous if there was anything at all I could do about it. People don’t moan about health and safety in India; there isn’t any to moan about.

Oh and it’s not non-smoking. The group of Americans opposite us are really not happy people.

Here we go…

This morning, went to the Jain temples I missed yesterday. There are five, as it happens, interlocking, interconnected, criss-crossing the streets. They’re very good, closeted and enclosed after the airy, openness of Ranakpur.

This afternoon a camel “safari” — on the way, we stopped off at a Mausoleum and then another Jain temple which we didn’t actually go in. The safari was a camel ride for two hours to some dunes, where we had fresh-cooked pakora, biscuits and a snack which tasted like a cross between poppadoms and monster munch. It was really fun in a donkey ride kind of sense. The town is the middle of a cold snap which made the desert pleasant.

We’re still on the waiting list for the train. We have a backup plan now involving a bus; apparently, without the tickets, we can’t travel anyway. I’d rather take the train, although some other Aussies (they get everywhere!) said the bus isn’t too bad.