Just sitting in Jaipur station waiting for our train to take us to Jodhpur, it is the first train we have taken that has been late and this one is so far predicted to arrive here 3 hours late! I just hope that it will not be much later than that.
We have just left a fantastic hotel, think that it is going to be the best that we stay in this whole trip! It was called the pearl palace in Jaipur http://www.hotelpearlpalace.com/. It had a really nice roof garden restaurant which was cheap and comfortable and it sold beer! Sitting up there last night we saw something quite amazing there were probably 20 or 30 birds of prey of all sizes flying over the roof of the hotel at sunset. It turns out that they were getting fed scraps from the kitchen of our hotel and also another building next door. I have never seen anything like it we tried to get some photos but they do not really show very much.
We met a couple of other people travelling about one girl from melborne and a guy from spain who we spent a night having dinner and drinking some kingfishers!. I wish her good luck as her trip sounds like it is going to get pretty tough when she heads up north and hopefully we are going to meet up in Oz.
Jaipur is a good city, so much better then Delhi you can walk around here without getting full on hassled to buy things or go places. We had a walk around the bazaars and i found the bangle market that i had so much fun at last time though i only bought one box of bangles this time. This is actually all that i have bought except for a couple of postcards and the essentials of food, travel and accommodation. It is a little different to last time i was here i think i spent more time and money on shopping then on food and accomodation! We also went to the hawah mahal (place of the winds) and had a wander around the observatory. The observatory looked like a giant adventure playground or some kind of sculpture park, i think that it may have been worth getting a guide to explain some of the structures but we didn't! oh well. The bazaars in jaipur sell all sorts clothes, kitchen ware, food, shoes etc. I think that i would have liked to stay here a little longer and look around a bit more. We had arranged to go to the amber fort where you can take an elephant up the hill to the fort, this unfortunately did not happen as i was not feeling very well (hopefully next time!).
Last night we left the hotel to eat, the first time since we arrived in Jaipur! and ended up in a south indian place in the city. We took a cycle rickshaw to the restaurant which was a change although there was a discrepancy over the price, bloody rickshaw drivers!!. We also went to bouncers bar nearby for a few beers, the staff constantly asking 'another one? yes?' a good place!
I wish the train was here! The trains so far have been really good. The train from Delhi to Jaipur was especially good. There were only 2 choices of class on it nice or very nice. There were comfortable reclining chairs, a paper to read and a bottle of water on boarding followed by tea (a insulated jug of water and some tea bags, sugar etc) and biscuits. We were given lunch and juice later on too all of which was included in the price. The only downside was the couple of cockroaches but they were only small and most of them were dead already!. Looking out of the window it was obvious that we were in a different state, first camels, the dry desert land, flashes of the bright green of parroqueets and bold colours of sarees on the women working in the fields as well as the rocky hills that emerge out of the desert every so often.
