India - Rajasthan

Jaipur was a city of luxury for us, we stayed in an amazing hotel (compared to most of the other hotels we have stayed at), with air conditioning and everything! The city is also quite historic and is surrounded by hills each with ancient forts and temples on them overlooking the city. The old city walls have always traditionally been painted pink, and so has been dubbed 'The Pink City', and glows when the sun goes down. They have been renovating all the pink walls, and old buildings, fixing them and making them more pink, and we thought that it all started to look a bit tacky. We stayed for just three nights before re-thinking our budget and getting bored. We had a day of sightseeing where we went to see the old city palace which was rather dull, another viewing tower for the ladies of the palace which was just completely covered in scaffolding and builders rubbish, but was quite cool none-the-less. It had some tiny passages, staircases and cubbyholes with minute wooden shuttered windows that the ladies could watch the processions below from without drawing attention to themselves.

Lastly we saw an ancient astlology and astronomy site. It was basically full of enourmous sun and moon light measuring equipment, including the largest sundial in the world (27 meters high!), all built out of stone and marble. The instruments were built near the beginning of the 18th century and still work perfectly today. The large sundial measures time accurate to 2 seconds!! Unfortunately the day that we went it was pouring with rain and none of it was working at all! This was very interesting though, and quite a bit different to all the normal palaces, forts and temples that we have become quite accustomed to. A highlight was walking to the top of the big sundial, and getting the view of the old city and looking down on all the different instruments scattered around the area. Walking around town that day was quite interesting as the heavy rains combined with poor drainage caused many of the streets to be flooded. Wading through them is a bit of an unknown quantity - you don't know what you are walking through!

We found ourselves getting quite irritated by all the hecklers around here, you can't walk for 1 minute without about 5 rickshaw drivers telling you where you should be going, and how cheaply they will take you there. You can also almost guarantee that anyone coming up to you to talk, no matter how honest they seem is going to try to extort money out of you. One time a friendly man came up to us and said, "can I just ask you something? Why do western tourists not like to talk to Indians?", "we do" we replied, "it's just a bit irritating when they're just after our money." "No, no, no" he said, "I just like to talk and make friends....anyway would you like to see my shop..."! Another time someone caught us coming out of a restaurant making very friendly conversation and ended up piling 'gifts' of beautiful hand made puppets on us. We said we couldn't give him anything for them but he said "money is not important, I want you to have these things", he wouldn't take them back, but when we said we had to go he said, "so what can you give me?" When he realised we weren't going to give him anything, he took all his things back and cleared off! This has become quite typical of very many of our experiences with Indians.

On our first night in Jaipur, we found a roof top restaurant (most of the restaurants around here seem to be roof top) just around the corner from our hotel that was just fab, we almost just decided to go there every night! All the tables and chairs were individualy wrought iron in a kind of modern art style which was quite cool. We could have just spent all our time between our hotel and this place infact! Sadly, a lot of our time was spent trying to sort out our New Zealand visas and the shipping of the van from Mumbai, now that it is all a bit more difficult than before. It is possible though and it will be done!

We are just realising how excited we are at the thought that we are going to New Zealand and that Simon is doing his flying course. He has had 'I believe I can fly' stuck in his head ever since finding out, and keeps driving down the dotted line in the middle of the road as though it was a runway!

Our Next stop is Udaipur, about 400 kilometers south of Jaipur, but we are in a bit of a dilema. Basically, we are trying to sort out the shipping of the van to New Zealand, but the shipping agent can't do that unless we have our flight tickets to Auckland to prove that we will be there to pick it up; We can't book our flights until we have our NZ visas; we can't get our visas until we have receipt that the flying course fees have been paid; we can't pay the fees until our bank gets its act together, and we are waiting to hear from them. To add to that, we don't know if we will even be able to arrange our visas in Mumbai, or if we have to go all the way back to Delhi to do it. Oh well, we just decided that we have to keep moving in the general direction of Mumbai, and if one or both of us has to go back up to Delhi then so be it.

Udiapur is a very beautiful city - they call it 'the Venice of the east', due to its position on a lake with palaces out in the middle of it. Indians had a great mindset back then, whereas in Europe they would designate a small lake island a protected reserve due to a rare species of plant that might only live on that island, the Indians just build a stonking huge palace on it covering the entire island! It gives a very fastastical and romantic feel though. Unfortunately at this time of year the lake is mostly dried up, and it is not until the end of the monsoon that it starts to get full (before promptly drying up again!), so it is not quite as beautiful as it could be. The locals are very proud that large portions of the James Bond film 'Octopussy' was filmed here, and most of the guesthouses show it in their restaurants every evening, and have done so since nineteen seventy whatever when it came out by the looks of things! We watched it the first evening we arrived on our guesthouse roof top terrace, and we must say it was extremely cool to watch a fairly well known iconic film, during which we would look to the left and say "oo, that's over there", then to the right, "that was down there!"

Our guesthouse is very handy being only about £2.40 a night. Our room kind of reminded us of the servants quarters that people in Kenya had, but that's fine, it's very pleasant, clean, quiet, quite pretty, and does good food. We found out that we can infact submit our visa applications in Mumbai, which is good news, but we may spend as much time as we can here sorting things out rather than in MUmbai which is the most expensive place in India to stay by about double the nearest competitor.

Now that we are eating out every day, we are discovering that almost any restaurant you go to is basically a carbon copy of all the others. They all just do Indian food, and then all kinds of Italian, Chinese, isreali and continental food with a strong Indian twist. We just resigned to the fact that once you have found a decent place, you're just as well going there every night! It is rather tiring though having no variety what-so-ever.

We did the tour of Udaipur with its impressive stone carved temples, and city palace overlooking the lake. All very grand and ornate, infact the whole city is really beautiful and much quieter than any of the other cities in India. We think it is definately the nicest in India so far, and one of the best cities on our trip. We also got an elephant ride here which Rhona has been going on about ever since we arrived in India, so that was good and a lot of fun. When we were lumbering down the street, our elephant would keep getting distracted by things, like fruit stands where it would try and pinch some snacks! The stall keepers didn't seem to mind though, and they would give it mangoes which kept him happy!

We spent four nights in Udaipur overall as it was so relaxing, and have really tried to make the transition from living in the van to living out of a rucksack in preparation for the month of backpacking through South East Asia before going to New Zealand. It felt wierd to be packing the van away so soon, almost like it was signalling the end of an era. Well we have to move on and it's the only way forward, so we'll just look forward to what will happen next!

Total distance travelled: 10,537 miles

Max temp: 35 degrees