La Gringa y Su Esposo: Jaipur – The Pink-ish City

My favorite Rajput trend - the curly mustache.

March 10

Another early train ride took us from Agra to Jaipur, the capital of Rajasthan. While Agra is famous for the architecture built by the Mughal Empire, Jaipur boasts of its palaces and forts built by the Rajputs who maintained a separate identity within the larger empire. Jaipur is especially known for the Pink City, an older part of town built around the city palace. We took a quick fifteen minute tuktuk to our hotel in the Pink City, which is really more of a burnt orange-salmon mix; burnt salmon? Unfortunately the pushy Golden Triangle touts from Agra were en force here, as well. HELLO! Sigh.

This district is pleasantly laid out as a grid with smaller alleys intersecting large blocks, and the main roads all had sidewalks teaming with merchants selling their wares. Stores of each type mostly clustered together, apparently mandated by the early ruler who oversaw the building of the city. We were staying off an alley in the bicycle region, with a half dozen bike shops each with a worker or two assembling new bikes or repairing old ones. Seemed like a lot of new bikes were being built, when every bicycle in use was at least 30 years old.

We visited City Palace, a museum about the history of the Maharajas of Jaipur. It included exhibits on the royal textiles and clothing, art and photography, weaponry, and a few other notable pieces, including giant 4000L silver urns used to transport water from the Ganges for rituals to maintain the purity of the first ruler to travel abroad, all set within the palace still inhabited by the royal family.

We also ate our first actual street food here, aloo kachori (potato dumpling) and a veg-tomato paste sandwich, fried open-faced in ghee and again after closing it, then topped with ketchup, spices, onion and herb leaves, and served with a green chutney and red sauce. This is the cheapest way to eat in India we’ve found, it would be easy to get a full meal for around $0.50. Not healthy, though. And spicy!

Our second day we started with Jantar Mantar, a bizarre collection of astrological structures and instruments from the 1700s. The first king was quite the Renaissance Man. Next we went to Albert Hall, another museum with a random collection of art, weaponry, and an Egyptian mummy. It was also filled with smoke detectors with dead batteries judging by the chirping heard throughout the building. There was a lot of overlap with the City Palace museum and we quickly finished and headed out to Amber fort and palace, spending the afternoon walking around the hills and palaces. There was an inscription here acknowledging the Mughal emperor Akbar while declaring Jaipur to be the domain of the Maharajas, demonstrating the interesting relationship between the Hindus and the Muslims within the empire. There was a 1km long evacuation tunnel leading from the palace to the Fort that the royals would use in case of attack. Half was underground, half a protected path between Amber Fort and Jaigarh Fort. We weren’t going to walk it, but the path looked so inviting that we ended up making the trip to Jaigarh Fort, which was primarily a military installation with only a small palace and a number of “helpful” guards that kept trying to give us tours that we didn’t want.

1km path from Amber Fort to Jaigarh Fort

We ended on the backside of Jaigarh Fort, tired and footsore, only to realize that it was a 7 km road down to the main area unless we backtracked the 2 km back through the forts by foot. After a brief bickering session with overcharging tuktuk drivers, we made our way back to the hotel. Looking forward to getting out of the super touristy areas.

We actually skipped Hawa Mahal (gasp!), a palace extension near city center with a lot of honeycombed windows where royal ladies could look at the street life without being seen. It’s one of the main tourist attractions of Jaipur, but we were palaced out and couldn’t bring ourselves to care. Onward!