Day One in Jaipur

Another fun train journey took us to Jaipur. I use the word “fun” very sarcastically. It was very early in the morning again and it was absolutely freezing! The train was really, really drafty and we were completely unprepared for that, I only had one thin hoodie with me and that really wasn’t enough. We were only on the train for five hours, but when you are that cold that is such a long time, I felt like it was never going to end! It wasn’t a sleeper train this time, but we did go for the cheapest option again – it was very crowded and very noisy. It’s funny, Indian people don’t seem to have any fear at all when it comes to trains; they don’t care which side of the train they get off from, they’ll just jump down on to the tracks, walk over them and climb up on to the platform on the other side.

Of course there were several rickshaw and taxi drivers waiting outside the station to pounce on tourists, we were caught by two very friendly and flirtatious young men, one was the driver and the other was his wing-man, who was better at English and whose job seemed to be charming us in to going with them! It did work though, they took us to our hostel and then managed to persuade us to use them again later. On the road that day I saw auto-rickshaws, cycle-rickshaws, bikes, motorbikes, buses, coaches, cars, vans, horse and cart, oxen and cart, cow and cart, camel and cart, man and cart, and… an elephant! Indian roads really are crazy; there are no organised lanes, just traffic weaving in and out of each other, trying to get through as quickly as they can by squeezing through gaps they should never attempt, drivers never seem to look when they’re getting on to roundabouts and they are continually cutting each other up very dangerously. The horn is used far more frequently than the brakes, each beep seems to say “I’m ploughing through, whether you like it or not, get out of the way or be mown down!” You get used to that pretty quickly though, it becomes normal, however our driver on that day was particularly terrifying! We had so many near misses in that rickshaw and nearly ran over about ten people,  why wait in traffic when you can just drive down the wrong side of the road?!

Here is a picture I took of a road, although it is much calmer than usual:

We did, however, get to our first stop in one piece – the monkey temple! We were slightly apprehensive about this at first, having heard lots of stories about monkey attacks, but we were reassured that these were all red-faced monkeys, the nice kind apparently, and that they were all very tame. Despite this there were some cheeky kids at the bottom of the hill (the temple being at the top) wanting us to pay them 100 rupees to be our “protectors” and walk up the path with us – not a chance! The monkeys did prove to be quite friendly, we bought peanuts which they came and took from our hands!

We did have one scary moment, when I accidentally scared a baby monkey by offering it a nut, it’s mother was not very pleased with me! I ran away from that one pretty quickly. Another scary moment came when we rounded the corner to see what seemed like hundreds of monkeys coming towards us, but it turned out they were just being herded by this guy:

The view from the top was very pretty, we got there in time to see the sun going down over the city.

On our way back we visited the floating palace, which really was very beautiful. We were told that they are planning to turn it in to a restaurant and our driver advised us that if we wanted to go on a romantic date, we should go there.

Of course after that we had to be taken on a detour to the shops that our driver got commission for, but we did visit one that I really liked, it sold goods from a factory that employed widows and poverty-stricken people who could not find work anywhere else. Indian shops are very good at hospitality; they welcome you in, offer you drinks and tell you that they wan’t you to feel at home there, no pressure to buy anything – although of course there is, they’ve just learned to be a bit more subtle about it.

I think possibly the best bit about that day came on the way home though… we got to drive a rickshaw! Our driver took us on to a quieter side street and let me jump in the front next to him, I think that maybe this was an excuse for him to put his arm around me, he had been flirting with both of us throughout the day although when it came to Rob’s turn he got no way near as close, but he was young and vaguely attractive so it wasn’t too creepy… and he was letting me drive his rickshaw so I allowed it! It was very exciting, and not something that tourists usually get to do so it was pretty special. Our friend Faith, who I think has been coming to India for about 30 years, was very impressed when we told her – it’s a big deal!

Our hostel in Jaipur was so much fun, there was such a friendly atmosphere there! It was great to meet and chat to people from all over the world – Americans, Australians, Germans, Brits, Chileans, Swedes – the most interesting were probably two American girls who had been working in Kurdistan with the Peace Corps for two years! They hated it. But they were really nice and I learned a lot from talking to them. The hostel was run by a really friendly Indian family, the boss being a lady who told us to call her Aunty, she enjoyed mothering all the backpackers and she thought I was cute so she loved me! She also thought my name was “Merry”, which she thought was brilliant because my name meant happy – a lot of Indians made that  mistake actually, whenever I introduced myself to anyone they would always say, “Oh Mary, Merry Christmas!” I gave up trying to correct them in the end.