Jaipur

Ah, three days without getting scammed!

I arrived in Jaipur from Varanasi on Saturday. Was exhausted and went pretty much right to bed after a small dinner (a “mini thali” in my hotel’s restaurant).

The hotel I’m staying at is quite chic, I must say. It’s a “heritage” hotel which means it’s in a very old, beautiful building — presumably from the 1800s or early 1900s. The one downside, which seems perhaps unavoidable anywhere in Jaipur, is the muezzin (the Muslim call to prayer) that wails over loudspeakers every morning before 6AM. This practically ensures I need to go to bed pre-10 PM to get anywhere close to 8 hours. The noise is itself not unpleasant, but the timing is rough!

I started Sunday early with a yoga class provided by my hotel. The instructor, an older man, was fully clothed, signifying this would not be a strenuous workout in the way Yoga tends to be in a place like NYC. Instead, the practice was almost silly — lots of hand-clapping, exaggerated movements (such as balling up and opening our fists or thrusting our arms back and forth), and even a period of forced laughter. It was a bit absurd, but I liked it.

I then had a decent breakfast at the hotel buffet (Masala chai, paratha, yogurt, stuff like that), and after a late-ish start hit the town, choosing to walk the 20 or so minutes from the hotel to the walled city where most of the inner-city tourism lies. Yes, I was so fed up with haggling about prices that I walked instead of taking a rickshaw, despite the difficulty of navigating India’s traffic-choked streets on foot.

Exhibiting a real spirit of stinginess, I was determined not to pay for anything I didn’t strictly need to pay for. As such, I planned my tour of Jaipur’s bazaars on foot, following a self-guided walking tour I’d found on a blog. Of course, in reality it was chaotic and thus hard to navigate, and I think I made it to less than half the spots the blog listed — and spent lots of time retracing my steps looking for things I ultimately couldn’t find. But I did see the major highlights, like the Hawa Mahal and the City Palace.

The doors of the City Palace! Talk about beautiful. People talk about the disparity between rich and poor in India, but I’ve been more struck so far with the difference between past and present — the areas where people live and work, for the most part, are congested, chaotic, and a bit grimy, whereas the historical buildings are grand, mostly clean, and peaceful. It makes one appreciate how long wealth disparity has been a defining feature of life.

For dinner, I found a non-veg restaurant that seemed to have good recs. It was really good, if maybe not the healthiest. My body was a little upset in the middle of the night.

Monday, I did nothing. I didn’t leave the hotel. I napped a bit. Sometimes you need days like that when traveling.

Today I got up early, before the muezzin. I packed, talked to my mom on the phone, and was at the hotel restaurant when it opened at 7. I had a good-sized breakfast and headed off to the famous Amer Fort, the seat of the rulers of Rajasthan for hundreds of years until their relocation to the city palace in Jaipur proper. The Amer Fort really does feel like a fort, in that, while it has beautiful areas, much of it seems to be purely functional in a straightforward unbeautiful way. Simple rooms, connected by simple hallways. The fort is quite large, and it was cool to walk the 2km tunnel to the older Jaigarh Fort located on the taller hill behind Amer. That fort was less visually striking, and older, but it does house the world’s largest cannon.

After Jaigarh, I walked through the town at the base of the Amer Fort, on the urging of a blog post that said the town was cute and untouristy. Maybe I was in the wrong town — it was untoursity for sure, but I can see why given the usual glut of traffic and street food that seemed probably unsafe for my stomach.

I took an Uber back to Jaipur and had a Rajasthani Thali for lunch. I’m not sure how this differs from a regular thali, but it was good.

After lunch, I had another scam-ish encounter, but this one I navigated well with my new ScamDar (tm). I first went to the Jaipur City Palace, intending to see the Chandra Mahal, the striking dwellings of the royal family. But it’s only open to the public for $40, which seemed a bit steep (most Indian tourist attractions cost <$10 even for foreigners). I admit I was being stingy, but it seemed like there was no end of interesting sights to see, and besides, the City Palace already offered plenty of stunning scenery I’d toured on Sunday. So I hailed a Tuk Tuk with the intention of heading to Albert Hall Museum, a museum about Rajasthan’s history (I presume — I didn’t end up going).

On hearing my plan, my driver suggested instead that he take me on a tour of a few sites: the burial grounds of Jaipur’s rulers, a textile manufacturer, and a lake palace. Obviously the textile manufacturer was intended as the upsell. He asked what seemed like a fair price to drive me around for a couple hours, which I was amenable to because I didn’t want to walk around a museum that badly. We did just that: saw sights, went to the textile market. I refused to buy anything, and paid the agreed-upon rate for the Tuk Tuk ride. And that, my friends, is how you scam the scammers.

From there, it was back to my hotel, where I read Shantaram for a couple hours until it was time to depart for Udaipur via overnight train.