Jaipur: Rajasthan, Part 2

From Udaipur, M. W. and I took an overnight train to Jaipur, the largest city and capital of the Rajasthan region. Train travel in India is an experience in and of itself; India has the second-largest and most expansive rail system in the world, and train travel remains a viable and popular option for intercity travel. I shouldn't be so surprised, but coming from the United States where train travel is essentially a curiosity outside of the Northeast Corridor, I couldn't help but be a little envious. Train travel is so popular in India that, even though we booked our tickets a month in advance, we were only able to reserve "AC 3 Sleeper" accommodations, which is one class below what most tour books recommend for Westerners. Oh well; it was fine, just a bit crowded. We did take a walk through the AC 2 and AC 1 cars, and the demographics definitely change. We were the only Westerners in our class. I've taken a few sleeper trains in Europe, and the main difference, aside from the behavioral norms of the passengers (which take getting used to), is that in AC 3 the berths are not segregated into compartments. We slept in essentially a giant train car with 62 beds in one room. It was a good experience!

At any rate, we arrived in Jaipur in the morning and made it to the hostel, where we crashed for a few hours before getting up at 9 AM and hitting the town. We stayed at Vinayak Guest House, which I note because it really stood out as the friendliest place I've stayed so far. The managers were gracious when we arrived much earlier than expected and let us sleep in singles for a few hours until our room was ready, and greeted us each morning with a cup of chai. If you're in Jaipur and staying on a budget, Vinayak is a great option.

First up we walked to the old city, called the Pink City because of the color all the facades are painted. M's guidebook recommended a walking tour, which took us through various districts specializing in different crafts. We walked through the part of town where all the stonecutters and masons work; where the jewel-cutters and polishers operate; the bazaar. We also saw more trash in the streets than anywhere to date (see below), and while cows may be sacred, they also live in, sleep in, and even eat the trash. I hope this isn't what upscale restaurants mean when they say "free range."




Suddenly we came upon Jaipur's most iconic building, the Palace of Winds. Its facade is beautiful, but there's not much to it. It's not really a palace so much as a structure allowing the noble women of the town to look out onto street life and processions without being seen. Throughout India we saw many examples of the traditional segregation of women of the court into "zenanas" or "harems", and one of their defining features is a set of highly latticed windows where the viewer can look out without being seen.



After some more wandering around, we visited Jantar Mantar, made a UNESCO World Heritage Site last year. It was cool, but personally I think it sets the bar a bit low for UNESCO status; it's basically a lot with several dozen astronomical structures, built by the astronomy-obsessed Jai Singh II several hundred years ago. He built five such lots around India, but this is the best preserved.




The last big stop in the old city was Jaipur's City Palace, another beautiful palace with an impressive armory. Indians apparently really liked building combo weapons, like a sword with two pistols attached and a knife that detaches from the hilt; or an arrow with a 12-inch half-moon blade attached to the front, for slicing an enemy's throat from afar. I have some pictures of the palace, but pictures in the armory were banned.



And finally for this day, we decided to take a hike up a hill overlooking Jaipur to Nahargarh, an old fort-cum-palace. The hike up was very enjoyable, and sort of reminded me of the Snake Path at Masada that I have never taken. From the top of the hill we had a great view over Jaipur.




The palace itself was impressive if only because it's beautiful, fairly new (I think only about 100 years old), and totally abandoned. That the maharajas could build such a place on a whim and then totally abandon it to go live in their other dozen palaces sort of astounds me. The number of beautiful, abandoned palaces we saw in India was interesting; I wonder how many of them would be turned into five-star hotels were they in Europe of the US.





The next day we hired a cab for the day and went off to see Amber Fort, Jaipur's most important attraction. On the way, we stopped to see the Water Palace, a half-submerged palace that you can only see from afar.



Amber Fort is a massive complex and was the stronghold of the rulers of the Jaipur region before they built Jaipur. It's a huge, fortified complex on the top of a hill, and was built to serve all the needs of a court. Next to it is Jaigarh Fort, a more military-style installation looking over and protecting it. We approached on foot, but there's a stable of about 100 painted elephants that ferry tourists up and down. The previous morning we had read a story in the local paper about the mistreatment of the elephants, that many of them are blind, and that almost none of them are considered "fit for riding", so we decided to skip that option. I think elephants by nature look a bit sad, but seeing dozens upon dozens of these huge creatures painted and forced to walk up and down the same path for years definitely made M and I consider starting an elephant revolt and stampede.




Like so many of the places where we spent hours walking around with an audioguide, I'm confronted with my inability to do Amber Fort justice. In addition to its beautiful architecture, we learned much about how the maharajas' court system worked: from the diwan-i am where they greeted the common man, to the diwan-i khas where they greeted courtiers more privately, to the zenana where eunuchs guarded their many wives and concubines, to the design and function of Mughal gardens and even Mughal bathrooms. Suffice it to say, this is a place you'll have to see for yourself.








Amber Fort took up most of the day. On the way to the train station for our evening train to Agra, we stopped by a workshop and learned a bit about what crafts Jaipur is best known for (turns out, gem cutting and polishing), but managed to escape without buying anything, even though one of the salesmen followed M into the street to try to sell him a $900 rug he had expressed some interest in. Overall, Jaipur's charms are definitely not its city center, but its outlying palaces and forts.

Next stop, Agra.

Udaipur: Rajasthan, Part 1

I didn't know when I planned it, but going from Mumbai to Udaipur would send me from one of the most crowded yet rapidly modernizing cities in the world to an extremely placid and relatively medieval town where, aside from the neon signs on top of hotels, most things look just like they did 300 years ago.

Udaipur was the first of two stops I had in Rajasthan, the "Land of Princes" southwest of Delhi, which is an amalgamation of many formerly independent or semi-independent domains of the Rajputs, or warrior-tribal-landowning leaders. Rajasthan is an area shaped by long-running wars between tribes, as well as its varied but largely arid geography and invasions by the Mughals and British, to name only a few. It is home to many of India's prettiest temples and most well-known traditional crafts, and many of its cities -- Udaipur, Jaipur, Jaisalmer, Jodhpur, etc -- are top Indian tourist destinations.

After landing at the impressively new airport, stage one was meeting up with M. W., who had flown into Ahmedabad that morning and took a car service 400 km to the hostel in Udaipur. It took me about two minutes of driving down the highway to tell that this place was different: no huge buildings, much less traffic, and far, far fewer people. Compared to the compression and intensity of Mumbai, driving into Udaipur was like exhaling a breath I hadn't realized I'd been holding in for a week.

After arriving at the hostel, which was orders of magnitude nicer than what I had left behind in Mumbai, M. W. and I grabbed some lunch and decided to hire a rickshaw driver to show us some of the highlights of the town, since the day was already half spent. Udaipur's dominating physical features are its three lakes, which have given Udaipur its nickname of "Venice of the East."


Our rickshaw driver took us to many secondary tourist sites, ranging from a park honoring Maharana Pratap Singh and his beloved horse Chetak (who could get a post of his own), to various gardens, to a museum of the history of the local Mewar dynasty.



By far the most impressive sites, however, were a whitewashed Jain temple (of which I couldn't take pictures) and a cemetery featuring at least 100 marble and limestone mausoleums and monuments to the dead Mewar rulers. Wandering around the cemetery, of a scale hard to capture in a photo, I was hit with both the longevity of this family (more than 70 generations to date have ruled Mewar) and the absurdity of the tombs they have built themselves. Their monumentosity seems diminished by the crampedness of their arrangement. Monuments on top of monuments, the place felt, especially in its abandoned state, like a jungle of stone rather than a palace.


Our last stop for the day was the aptly named Sunset Point, where M. W. and I watched the sun go down over Lake Pichola, snapping pitures of Jag Mandir island, the Lake Palace Hotel, and the City Palace. The camera MC got me really takes beautiful shots.




The next day we hit Udaipur's big sites on foot. While this town is comparatively less dense and crazy than Mumbai, I don't mean that it wasn't as poor and in some ways much more backward. Unlike Mumbai and Delhi, which were built or rebuilt by Westerners, or else destroyed and more recently rebuilt by Indians, Udaipur was built by the Maharana especially because of its security, and as a result it remains essentially a time capsuled medieval Indian city. The roads are narrow and twist around and around with nothing like urban planning, and unlike Mumbai this town has open sewers, which I discovered could completely changed the character of a place. Walking down the street was often more chaotic than it was in Mumbai, and the addition of cows every few meters made things more confusing.

Still, we found our way to Jagdish Temple, a roughly 400-year-old example of Indo-Aryan religious architecture in the center of the old city of Udaipur. We hired a local guide, who explained much more about Hindu architecture than I can write about in the context of this post. Suffice it to say that these temples are every bit as symbolic as our cathedrals, but in classic Indian style manage to pack a lot more detail into much less space.




From there, we advanced to the City Palace, the seat of the Mewar custodianship, which ruled Mewar for 1,400 years and whose capital for the last four or five hundred has been Udaipur. We took an excellent, if propagandish audioguide, but there's really much too much to go over in this enormous palace for one post. I'll just include some of my favorite rooms.






From there we wandered around the town a bit more, before making our way to the waterfront and taking a ferry to Jag Mandir Island, where we saw the Lake Garden Palace, the last of Udaipur's major attractions (other than the Lake Palace Hotel, site of filming for the movie Octopussy, which we did not visit). The ferry included some beautiful views of Udaipur, and once you get there it's basically another nice Mewar palace, but with an overpriced coffee bar.




We saw some creepy-looking monkeys, walked back to the hostel, and that was a wrap for Udaipur.



Well, this was a mammoth post. I was intending to get to Jaipur, as well, but for your sanity and mine I think that will wait for tomorrow (whenever that is).

Thanks again to everyone who's been reading this and the kind comments you've been sending to my email. Hope all is well with you.