Tuesday 19th Jaipur The Pink City

Out at 9am and took rickshaw to the City Palace, the building of which was started in around 1730 and been added to up until the 20th century. We hired audiophones and spent over two and a half hours exploring.



The Maharaja's descendants still live in part of the palace which is in perfect condition, there are numerous buildings, courtyards, gateways, arches and carvings. There is a museum and art gallery and so much to see it could take all day. To begin we saw an exhibition including wonderful clothing, among which were garments of Maharaja Sawai Madho Sing I who was enormously tall and wide weighing 250kg - he had 108 wives.


In a large pavilion are two silver urns reputedly the worlds largest silver vessels, weighing 750lbs and over 5ft high they were made from 14000 silver coins, their purpose was to transport water from the Ganges for the Maharaja, when he attended the coronation of Edward seventh in London in 1901.






It is very spacious and everything is very well presented. In one inner courtyard there are four gates representing the seasons, each is beautifully decorated one green another pink, one is decorated with lotus and the fourth and best with peacock motifs - we waited ages to photograph each one without unknown people trying to pose for us!!



Another building houses weaponry - some very nasty - swords, guns, cannon all beautifully adorned mainly in silver, all this fantastic workmanship to be used in war. Another building housed palaquins and chariots, we saw a golden throne, beautiful paintings, furniture, glass and so much more.

We then thought we would go to the Palace of Winds - Hawa Mahal, somewhere I specially wanted to visit, the rickshaw driver told us that it was just a shell, what a let down, he drove to a main road where we gazed at a pink building with open shops below and along the pavement, we were assured this was it - but I had done my homework and was going to find out a bit more! Anyway the driver took us to quite a nice place for lunch.

Next stop was to be the Gaitor, the funeral ground of the rulers of Jaipur with many cenotaphs but once again this young man took us where he wanted, this was the Maharani ki Chhatri which had some with lovely marble and stone cenotaphs but we were unable to obtain any information except that this had been built for the royal ladies of Jaipur. We then thought we might go to one of the bazaars instead of which we were taken to some warehouse type place selling bedspreads and fabric - he obviously thought he was going to earn commission - enough, we went back to the hotel and sat on the verandah and read.

That evening with the help of a rickshaw driver we found the hidden Ganesh Restaurant - must go there said our daughters - not what we had expected, it is a rooftop restaurant on top of the city walls looking down onto the street very cheap, good basic vegetarian food and no beer, but it was lovely and cool. While we were there some Swiss people turned up and asked our opinion as they were very nervous of the dreadful things you can pick up in india.

The pollution here is dreadful all the time we are driving I have kept a large handkerchief over my nose and mouth and kept the sunglasses on. The roads are jam packed it's chaotic.