Dan's Adventure

Many cities in India bill themselves as the “some colour city”, Jaipur, the pink city, is actually more orangey than pink so I was a bit disappointed when I arrived at the gateway to the old city. Every evening I would walk the streets trying to see the famed colour changing, but nothing, just lots of traffic and piles of rubbish everywhere. In preparation for Diwali many of the streets have lights hanging across the road which does give the city a certain charm. Temporary shops are open to sell fireworks, one of the bigger brands, Cock, has some pretty good banners plastered everywhere reading “Choose the best” up top, “Cock” taking up most of the banner in the middle and “brand fireworks” in small lettering below. It made me smile anyway.

The Janter Manter, a collection of astronomical instruments, was my first port of call in Jaipur. Home to the world’s largest sun dial, which can tell the time accurate to 2 seconds, and numerous instruments used to calculate the position of the sun and stars, the collection is pretty impressive.

I met a Kiwi guy after I left the Wind Palace and together we took the local bus to the Amber Palace the following day. Any palace that has a route for pedestrians and another for elephants must be worth visiting. I didn’t fork out the money for an elephant ride and instead walked up to both the Amber Fort and Jaigarh Fort which sits 400ft above the Amber Fort. Jaigarh Fort houses the world’s largest cannon, Jaivana, from which the myths say that it was only ever fired once as a test fire by the Maharajah and the cannon ball flew 40km! If you plan to visit both the City Palace and Jaigarh Fort, visit City Palace first as the ticket for that provides you with a free entry for Jaigarh Fort. I discovered this the morning after visiting Jaigarh once I’d bought my City Palace ticket.

Jaipur may have some interesting sites but overall I didn’t like the city. It was far too busy and noisy, it was just very tiresome. On my final day there the Kiwi and I both ended up independently going to see the same bollywood film at the cinema. I never knew that the cinema was supposed to be an audience participation event – the Indians cheered and shouted at the actors during the film, and also added to the film by making phone calls throughout the film. Although the film was in Hindi it was extremely easy to follow; a story about cricket with a love story thrown in as well as the occasional English phrase to keep us English speakers on track. Rubbish film but it killed a few hours whilst I was waiting to escape Jaipur.