Last Friday we left our comfortable abode in Dwarka for the bright lights and stuff of Jaipur- an amazingly historical city in the rajasthan desert. We left at 5.30am and had a very hot 5 hours bus journey to get there, only for me to realise that in my sleep deprived state I’d left my passport behind. It turns out that passports are absolutely essential for staying overnight anywhere, and i was told very bluntly by the hotel management that trying to get around it would be fraud… it didn’t look good for our weekend away.
We called up John our host to explain to him what had happened- and he told me that Anand would find a way into our appartment, then hung up. 30 minutes later scans of my passport were being faxed through to the hotel! When we got back from our trip we found our front door bolt loose and slightly mangled- Anand had simply taken a mallet to it and was in in a few seconds! What a guy.
So our weekend went on as planned- we visited all the general “must see” places like Amber Fort and Hawa Mahal and were thoroughly architectured out by the time we were done- we were in a bit of a daze. We spent our first evening in a place called Choki Dhani a bit outside the city, which was pretty much a cultural theme park (but without rides) which according to lonely planet is particularly popular with middle class Indian families. We had an all you can eat meal off banana leaves, wore turbans, had ‘traditional’ head massages (I’m sure it was just an excuse to beat us up- there was a lot of slapping, face smooshing and joint cracking) and rode on camels for 5RS (7p).
All of Saturday was spent sight seeing, the “monkey temple” was best. Set up in the hills, it has pools ‘several elephants deep’, amazing temples and hundreds of monkeys, which took peanuts from our hands and climbed on us. We were guided around for part of the time, and went into a very small dark shrine which felt slightly disturbing- we had to get out. There is some pretty strange stuff going on in the area- at one place we passed they daily sacrifice goats, and it used to be a daily human sacrifice.
Our bus journey back was a bit longer- we got stuck in a 4 hour stand still on the motorway so we didn’t get back until about2.30 am. It was amazing though, a man on the bus told us when to get off, which seemed to be a completely remote part of motorway, but an auto was sitting just along the road so we got on that and were home in minutes.
It was such an awesome weekend, this weekend we are hopefully going to see the Taj for Naomi’s birthday- trying to cram it all in before we leave oh so soon.
David
