Jaipur → Agra (Part I)

I've decided to break my trip down into 3 parts. My whirlwind tour of Rajasthan started when the plane touched down in Jaipur: the hottest, dirtiest, cleverest city I’ve seen in my life. We checked into my (first!) budget hotel and set out into the garbage heat (literally piles of garbage were being burned everywhere) to find some food. There are no taximeters or set auto fares, everything is set up for maximum hassle and extortion. “Miss miss take my taxi, I give you good price, you enjoy now and pay later. Want to hire me for the day? Here are pictures of other white people having fun with me.” I learned to start shaking my head when I set out and not stop until we reached our destination. Overwhelmed, we didn’t go far to find a restaurant and sat down at the first clean place we could find. Rajasthan has northern Indian food! The food I’ve been craving! I had a delicious muttar paneer (tomato dish with peas and cheese), naan, and Rajasthan’s special Lassi (a yogurt drink.) Michael felt feverish so he spent the rest of the day/night in the hotel and I went to explore the city. I’d like to think I’m very savvy when it comes to bargaining. I’ve learned some key phrases “chi chi”- (shame on you), “bad karma” (which I use when they REALLY try to rip me off), “Eh Baba”- OH my god (in an exasperated way). I took 2 autos and realized everyone thought I was Indian! In the north, I blend right in! Jaipur is a bizarre city. People on elephants and camels pass BMWs and motorcycles. That sight, even after 8 days, still made me squeal. My first stop was the Hawa Mahal a very old palace built by the Raja for the women and courtesans of the court so they can look out on the city without the city ever seeing them. I got hired by a tour guide (that’s really what it feels like) and he took me around the amazing spiraling palace. There were 367 lattice windows the women could look out of but no one could see into. I could just imagine the archways and courtyards filled with swaying colored sarees and loud with bangles and anklets. I next wanted to visit Jantar Matal the famous outdoor observatory but it was kind of far away and would close in an hour! “That’s ok, we’ll make it if you hop on my scooter,” my handsome tour guide said. “Ok!” Stupid? Maybe. But thrilling. We sped through the city through an obstacle course of cow dung and toured the observatory. Built by another Raja, the bizarre observatory with huge structures and odd angles was set up so the sun told different information about the month, star alignment and time through the shadows made on the structures. The structures included the world’s largest sundial! I said goodbye to my tour man and not only 2 minutes later found myself in a middle of a parade! I found a very cushy seat on the roof of the tourist bureau (they were seating tourists for free and serving them tasty sweets) and watched twirling dancers and elephants pour out of the City Palace. The parade was beautiful, and like most of Rajasthan was at the same time bursting with color and shrouded by some kind of desert mystery. I grew bored because it moved very slow and walked instead down the deserted marketplace. I watched families on rooftops watching the parade. Even the poorest house looks a bit like a palace in Rajasthan because of the ornate architecture. I sat on a rail and this man came up to me and talked with me for about a half an hour. Next thing you know, I bought 2 puppets from him that I didn’t want for a price I didn’t want to pay. I don’t know how it happened. Feeling stupid I went back to the hotel and Michael and I went to dinner (at the same place :-p) and I ate a delicious stuffed tomato. We woke up at 4:30 (for the second day in a row. ooooooof.) and dragged our bags over to the train station. The only ticket we could book was the top class, known as 2AC, which stands for only a two-tier bunk bed and it’s an air-conditioned compartment. The bunk beds in this compartment (unlike the others) have a curtain that can be pulled to give each bed some privacy. This was luxury. We found two other white people sharing our compartment! (I have a theory the train conductors pair non-Indian sounding last names together on the train because the odds are too slim for it to have happened as much as it did). My first thought was “crap, now we have to be all social and I won’t be able to sleep.” But I’m so glad we were. They were a married couple, Leo from Brooklyn (!) and Paula from Colombia on their third anniversary. We talked for the entirety of the 4-hour ride and decided to stick together in Agra. We went straight to the Taj Mahal. 

 Of course. It was big, gorgeous, packed with tourists taking funny photos of them “holding” the Taj, and it looked exactly like all the photos I’ve seen. But I wasn’t awed. Countless things in India take my breath away but the Taj Mahal just wasn’t one of them. Anyway it was really hot and the white marble just reflected it all back in our faces. We lay in the shade under one of the pillars for a while and then decided we had enough and went to a hotel for drinks. No I’m sorry, we didn’t go to “A” hotel we went to “THE” hotel. The Oberoi hotel is the top rated hotel in India with a minimum of $650 a night. We sat in the bar, were served delicious drinks with ice (! all the water was filtered in their own private underground filtration system…duh) by bowing waiters, with a straight view of the Taj Mahal. But the marble halls and white walls didn’t last and we were back into the dirty heat. We said goodbye to our new friends and went to a restaurant where we ordered lots of food buuut Michael and I both read the time wrong and realized we only had 10 minutes to get our bags out of the cloak room and get on the train! We ran out of the restaurant screaming “sorry!” ran to the cloak room, but we forgot the receipt so I started fake crying and the guy FINALLY let us have the bags (which is scary by the way) we ran to the train and were on the waiting list! “Sorry there is no way you can get on this train.” I start fake crying again. Although it may have been more real than fake at that point. FINALLY we get onto the train. Our reward? A nice crowded, hot, smelly, dirty, loud, 3-tier, claustrophobic box of a train. All night.