Jaipur, the Pink City

It was a quick and easy 2-hour train journey to Jaipur, spent chatting to a friendly sari shop owner. Sarah initially thought we could walk to the accommodation area, but after a few minutes she realised the scale on the map and we got a rickshaw to a recommended hotel (the driver was a really genuinely nice guy, with good English and no scamming!). As usual we ended up staying at a cheaper place just down the road (not in the guidebooks of course), and it was another lovely spot (Meena Hotel, just down from the Evergreen).

I really wanted to hire bicycles to explore the city, as it's a bit too spread out to explore easily on foot. But in 3 days we never managed to find a place that hired bikes out, and that was after asking numerous hotels and 2 tourist offices - it seems all tourists are lazy bums who must get rickshaws everywhere.

Our first day we did the walking tour mentioned in the Lonely Planet, which took in some of the main sights, although we didn't 'do' any of the museums as it was getting a bit late in the afternoon.

The following day was a late start, but after a delicious lassi (a cool yogurt drink) at the famous local Lassiwalla, we didn't really get up to much really. We checked out the Hawa Mahal and looked at the observatory while avoiding the rain (we didn't bother paying the entrance fee as you could see all of the instruments from the gift shop!), and just using the Internet and having a few drinks that night in 'Bouncers' after a great dinner of Lal Maas in the fancy Niro's.

Our last day in Jaipur was the most frustrating (we had the whole day as our train to Udaipur was at 10:35pm). After a great start of lunch at Handi (sister restaurant to the next-door, and more expensive, Copper Chimney, and even better I thought), I spent hours walking around trying to find a bike-hire place, but again to no avail (the Rough Guide mentioned a place, giving the address, but the street wasn't marked on their map. I later found the street marked on the Lonely Planet map, and we had been really close - d'oh!). After I eventually gave up in frustration we got a local bus a couple of kilometers to the base of the monkey temple, and climbed up there. It had great views of the city, and lots of cheeky monkeys of course, and at least we felt we'd achieved something with the day.

All-in-all, I wasn't that impressed with Jaipur really. I don't know what I was expecting exactly, but it's always listed as a highlight of Rajasthan, and Rajasthan is always listed as a highlight of India. But for me it was too spread out to explore easily (a bike would have helped enormously of course), and the architectural sights weren't that impressive. As for it being 'The Pink City', I didn't get much impression of that either - mostly it just seemed the usual grubby Indian city to me. But for all that, the restaurants were great!

Anyway, after the Monkey Temple, it was another local bus to the centre, back to the internet place where Sarah had left her MP3 player (they still had it luckily), and then a coffee place to read the papers and relax for a bit. Having so much time to spare we walked to the train station, but on arriving discovered the train was 45 minutes delayed. But it pulled out after only10 minutes and made up time on the way and we arrived in Udaipur pretty much on time.

The train was frustrating for me though, as I couldn't get to sleep for ages. Firstly there was confusion over the sleeping berths for some reason, with the seats numbers being overridden with chalk, but the ticket inspector guy sorted all that out.

Although it was a sleeper carriage, and everyone went straight to bed, I had a young kid and his dad next to me and they continued talking until 2am. They seemed to take no notice of the fact that everyone else was trying to sleep, as they talked loudly, normally and continuously. If I had been anywhere in the West I would have quickly told them to shut the hell up, but the fact was I was in India. Here, as in many 3rd-world countries, local people seem to be completely surrounded by noise their entire lives, and so seem to be able to sleep under any noise conditions. So I reckoned these 2 had no concept of respecting other people's desire to peace and quiet as they slept, as nobody but me in that carriage actually needed peace and quiet to sleep.

So instead of getting really mad and shouting at them to shut up, I tried to meditate on the cultural differences of India and tell myself that my increasing anger was just being self-created - but alas, to no avail - I still couldn't sleep and was slowly been driven demented! They eventually shut up and went to sleep at 2am, and after a bit longer I drifted off. I suppose I could have tried asking them nicely to be quiet, but I doubted that they'd understand, and I would have just frustrated myself even more trying to explain why I had a problem.

So at 7am or so the train pulled into Udaipur. It was the last stop for the train, so I stayed 'in bed' (sleeper class is just a comfy bunk really) right until the train stopped, and then we just hopped off and started the usual rigmarole to sort out somewhere to stay.