Jaipur

Bad nights sleep. Felt sick! Hassle to get to right bus stand – but get the last seats on the 8.30am deluxe to Jaipur. 

We travel through scrubby desert with mountains in distance. A few really beautifully decorated houses – bright colours and flowers.  camels. Dung piles with decorations on side. 

Jaipur is huge, much bigger than we imagined. Get a rickshaw to the Diggy Palace. Amazing room with sitting room bit and AC and old paintings on the wall. Cool off for a bit then rickshaw to pass the Palace of Dreams. Haggle for cushion covers but don’t get any. Hindu temple. Past the City Palace. 

Charlie eats alone, while I stay in room being ill. But cool!

We eat banana pancakes for breakfast on the  terrace surrounded by overhanging bourganvillia and other flowers. Then go by car to Amber…past Jal Mahal a water palace on Man Sagar lake. 

At Amber there’s a Kali festival in full swing. Charlie makes a puja and gets an orange spot for one rupee. We climb up the steep hill which was chockablock with elephants with decorated faces.

We marvel at the Sheesh Mahal…the mirrored palace and a man lifts up a candle to show the hundreds of reflections scattered on the walls and ceilings singing twinkle twinkle little star ⭐️ 

We go wandering round the back end of the fort, up, and down steps getting completely lost down alleyways. On the way back we went into the heart of the old city to the City Palace and the textile museum.

There we saw the massive clothes of the Maharaja Sawai Singh…a well endowed man who had eight wives and a hundred concubines but no children!

Back to Diggi Palace to cool off and then sit on the lawn with a mint tea and watch birds and chipmunks. I had stuffed tomatoes and spinach for tea but my stomach is still bad 💩

The next day we visited paper and textile factories.In the first paper factory, women sat on the floor plucking petals, the air filled with a lovely scent. White paper was being made from rose petals in a large work area, with vast warehouse spaces beyond. Cotton from southern India…used for T-shirt material…was chopped up and soaked. Two men worked at each vat, layering the fibres before pressing, peeling and hanging the sheets to dry. In another factory, bright turquoise paper hung everywhere; trimmings and waste paper were recycled. People sat on the floor making small paper carrier bags…so familiar, yet strangely moving to see how patiently they were made. Another workshop felt more higgledy-piggledy: block-printed napkins, T-shirt printing, and bits of everything going on at once. We bought tablecloths. 

We visited another paper factory, cool inside, where a man worked wearing plastic aprons. A few lengths of cloth lay drying by the river. 

Back in the dry heat, we sat on the lawn trying to plan our itinerary, it was very difficult to decide what to do next.

Get a rickshaw to the Ramburg Palace Hotel for tea and homemade biscuits on the lawn, what a contrast to the backstreets of Agra…cool fountains, green grass, and views across to some ruins on the hillside.

Then to a jewellery workshop on the edge of town. The salesman says he is a healer !?? He said he could sense my energy, good and bad and that my beads were good for my throat. I bought a silver snake necklace and two bangles. He said my work was creative or teaching, and that the last two years had been very up and down. He showed stones embedded in his arm and he was writing a book about how stones can heal.

Later we went to another textile factory for Charlie to buy a white pyjama suit, and then to a carpet workshop…fascinating watching them cut the pile. Natural dyes like henna and spinach were used to ‘antique’ the carpets! The looms were much larger than those we’d seen before. 

We stopped at LMB (Laxmi Misthan Bhandar)…a famous sweet shop founded in 1954! Charlie had a potato chickpea fritter…I of course had sweets! Crossing the road was terrifying.

Back at Diggi Palace we sat outside and I ate macaroni cheese it was all my stomach could cope with! 

It was windy but still very hot …we decided not to go to Shekhawati… 

The next day the driver Sahid quoted 700 rupees to drive us to Bagru so a quick change of plan and decided to take a car  to Pushkar via Bagru. So with an extra day in Jaipur we went to another jewellery place and then the Palace of the Wind, finally buy some cushion covers and then ventured into the really wacky Museum of Indology! Dusty display cases and polythene over the top of things. Weird and wonderful! 

Later we sat on the lawn and watched a film crew setting up for a  shoot.  Just as we are finishing our dinner… chowmein…Wilson calls us down to watch traditional Indian dancers with free beer! 

All the tables were lit with candles. Tina the Indian actress apparently was not ready but there was a really smartly dressed lady sitting at one table and a German man getting very drunk ( so we thought!) 

The dances were beautiful but the actress was not sure what she was doing. The arguments between the posh lady and the German were all part of the movie! 

A very enjoyable evening.