NIT - Jaipur / Jodhpur

Day 10: 28 Sep ‘09 - Travel to Jaipur, The Pink City (235 Km – 6 Hr)

 

Maharaja Jai Singh founded Jaipur, which is surrounded by hill on all sides.  Enroute visit Fatehpur Sikri, built by Mughal Emperor Akbar in 1569 and abandoned due to scarcity of water.

On the road again -  from Agra to Jaipur in Rajasthan, where we noted a higher use of mechanical farming relative to the paddy fields of the South.  Rajasthanis raise more grains in the Eastern side of the state.  Approaching Rajasthan you encounter the Thar Desert, and it looks like many have attempted to farm the desert, but due to droughts the past 5+ years, farming has not reaped much reward.

Rajasthan is famous for stone quarring and carving.  There are many, many quarries and stone carving merchants lining the highways.  From East to West, our 

direction of travel, we encountered marbles and then sandstones as we went deeper into the desert.  Also, we encountered odd little trucks on the roadways that had exposed engines.  Nitin told us they were used to power water pumps (via the PTO).  The operator would drive the vehicle out to the fields, and hook it up to the pump.  At the end of the day, the operator would fill the truck bed with grasses for livestock and return home.  The same practice is done in South India, only with oxen, and the ox does not power a pump, it pulls a plow in a paddy. And like Southern India, a number of brick factories exist along the highway; although there is a major difference in that the Rajasthanis use actual brick kilns, whereas, their Southern counterparts pile the  bricks around several embedded logs, and the whole pyre is set afire.  We noticed that the number of camels and camel wagons was on the increase; especially as we got deeper into the Thar.  More on camel interactions later.

We checked our hotel (Shiv Vilas) and settled in for the evening after a long and tiring drive.  This hotel is unbelievable to encounter.  Truly, a marble palace, but looks are deceiving for the second chicken culinary incident occurred as Larrie ordered chicken tikka for dinner, which is cooked in a tandoor oven, or undercooked as was this case.  When the plate was to be cleared, the waiter asked if I was done, yes, I was done.  Well, sir, was the chicken too spicy?  No, not too spicy, but not cooked either.  Well, the autopsy that occurred on that chicken order was worthy of a Bones episode.  Four chefs, three waiters, and a couple of other interested folks (you see, in India, your business is every ones business) were required to assess the damage to the brand.  Apologies were explicitly made promptly, and amends were offered.  For the rest of our visit to Shiv Vilas, our food was closely monitored and the service was overwhelming.  We do not know if the offending chef survived the incident.

In this post I was going to provide a link to the hotel website, and this just gets better as we now know what happened to the tandoor chicken chef, but their web site domain name expired Oct 6, 2009 at 2:10 am.  The hotel chef must have moonlighted as the webmaster, and not only did he undercook the chicken, but he let the domain license lapse.  So, I guess you will have to wait to see the pix of this palace.  Dateline Oct 18, 3:13 pm, the Shiv Vilas domain name is restored, and you can now cruise through their website.  The fate of the chef / webmaster is still undetermined....

As stated above, this hotel is amazing – the pool was made entirely of inlaid marble!  And I think we were about the only people in residence; truly, the off season.  Also, while a growing number of pigeons watered at the pool, the attendants were quick to shoo them away, and the pool enjoyed a swimmable water quality – a must to maintain Jess’ contentment level.  She gets really cranky if she sees a pool and cannot swim; more so that being booked into a hotel without a pool.  Jess and Larrie had a good time swimming underwater up to drinking pigeons, and then violently surfacing with a maximum effect on feathers lost attempting to escape the lurking menaces.

Day 11: 29 Sep ‘09 - Jaipur: The Amber Fort (with elephant ride), and City Palace.

Ok, another elephant ride.  If you recall from the Kerala trip last Dec, Alli and Larrie swore off elephant rides.  This one was unavoidable, and at least it was non-injurious.  Larrie even did a little foreign exchange while riding as US dollar tips given to the elephant keepers needed to be changed into Indian rupees.  The elephants transported us up the hill to the fort.  The animals were owned by individuals, and each animal would make three trips a day up to the fort.  These elephants had a flat bottomed "top rack" to sit in, which made the trip physically bearable as long as you got into the sway of the beast.  However, the unbearable things about Jaipur, and specifically the Amber Fort, are 1) the heat (damn, it’s hot in Rajasthan), and 2) the hawkers - thick as flies and just as bothersome.  Oh, make that three things, 3) everyone, I mean everyone, thinks you should give them rupees.  Folks will walk up with a snake in a basket, or an old violin like instrument, and begin to perform, whether you want it or not, and expect to paid for their performance.  The choice was not to pay!

Observations of note in the Amber Fort ...

The maharaja had a queen and a harem, and apparently according to the traditions of the day the women were not to be seen by commoners.  So, special stone panels were created to provide a screen to hide the women from view, but to allow the women to see and hear what was going on.  What was unique about the panels at the Amber Fort palace was that in the center of the stone, the orifice diameter was smaller, creating a venturi effect to cool the women.  The air entering was compressed and then expanded via how the stone was carved, and it was single piece of stone for a 3’x6’ panel, and it was entirely made of white marble - quite pretty to see.

The fort was on top of a hill, and water needed to be moved from a reservoir up to the fort.  Several ladders were created where water was moved up the hill, and the last elevation was via a donkey driven earthen pot lift (donkey walks in circles turning shaft; shaft goes through a couple of wooden gears to drive a pulley arrangement that pulled a rope with 1 liter earthen pots up a shaft).  There was an impressive array of bats in the shaft and a couple of pigeon eggs in the earthen pots.  Gladly, the current water supply is no longer via this path.  Next we toured an astronomical observatory built by Maharaja Jai Singh to keep the time and track astronomical events.  The stone tools are very accurate, and the gradient markings are precisely carved into the stones.

The current maharaja lives at the City Palace where a number of attached museums display armaments (knives and guns) of the warrior caste, period and caste clothing and other memorabilia of the Emporer.  Also displayed are a couple of huge silver urns used to transport Ganga river water to London.  It would seem that it is against Hindu tradition to cross big expanses of water, and the emporer had been invited to attend some royal function in London.  He took the water of the Ganga with him to maintain his link to his tradition.

Jaipur is known for jewelry, and you quickly discover that you will pay many times for that jewelry in Jaipur as other places in India.  We stopped at a place to see how jewels are faceted, and it just happened to have a jewelry shop attached. (wink, wink) And apparently, the shop was owned by the same guy that owned the hotel we were staying at.  Small world, eh?  Beautiful stuff, but you can buy the same stuff in B’lore at 1/6 the cost.  Alli was looking at a pretty piece of stone in a pendent, but when the shop keeper was offered B’lore price for it, the conversation ended.  I guess he was too arrogant about his stone to be part of the global market.

Day 12: 30 Sep ‘09 - Jaipur to Jodhpur (330 Kms – 6 Hrs)

‘Nuther long drive:  We left Shiv Vilas and drove North until we got to the national highway intersection for the road to Jodhpur.  This particular section is like Interstates 80,90,94 confluence in Chicago as the conflagration of trucks on that little road defies safety norms.  Nitin warned us that about 100km of the trip was going to be a bit hairy.  

The farther into the Thar desert, the dryer it gets, and there are not very many folks, which makes for fewer obstacles to progress on the highway.  There were many hills of tilted rock and quarries.  The locals used rocks to pile as fences between properties, and there were lots of rock walls – nicely built, too.  At Krishgarth we ran into a lot of lorries hauling big blocks of marble to and from the marble processors.  A number of carving merchants lined the road, and there were a lot of inlaid rounds for flooring center pieces.  Another common theme in this area were fountains and carved marble animals (lions, elephants, tigers, etc.), including one full sized elephant.  

We arrived in Jodhpur in pretty good shape, but we were hot, dry and tired from the heat.  After checking into our rooms at the Taj Hari Mahal, we retired to the edge of the pool for beers while Jess diligently worked at keeping the pigeons out of the pool.

Day 13: 01 Oct ‘09 - Jodhpur

Jodhpur is one of the favorite tourist destinations in Rajasthan. The Mehrangarh Fort is the most magnificent fort in Jodhpur, situated on a 150m high hill. Umaid Bhavan Palace: Constructed in the 20th century by Maharaja Umaid Singh.

Not a whole lot to say about the two venues we visited in Jodhpur.  A fort is a fort, and while the Mehrangarh Fort is a nice fort, it is not exceptional.  UN World Heritage status makes it a nice fort and keeps away the rif-raf so you can enjoy yourself.  However, after the Red Fort in Agra, and the Amber Fort in Jaipur, they start to look the same, and it requires real fortitude to keep up the interest.  There is a gift shop at the end of tour of the fort, and as a special incentive to buy something, they display some very nice art from a "supported" art school related to the fort.  And while you would think that starving artists seeking renumeration for their efforts would seek a fair price, the fact is they are only too quick to help to relieve you of your burdon of  money.  Nice art, too expensive = artist still starving and frustrated by sales.

The Umaid Bhavan Palace was built back in the 1920’s because the maharaja needed to put some people to work lest they create an uprising during an economic downturn.  Nice building, but again not exceptional.  The current maharaja lives in one wing of the palace, one wing is a museum, and the other half is a hotel.

Jodhpur is famous for the invention of the jodhpur equestrian pants, and we thought it would be grand if Jess bought her jodhpurs in Jodhpur.  So, that evening we went in search of same.  We did find them, but only after a mind numbing 30 minute display of bed covers that are woven in the area.  We finally pulled a Pam and told the guy that if the next thing he showed us was not jodhpur pants, we were leaving.  They cost us Rs. 800, and we proudly walked back to car.