Jaipur (13 - 15 January 2008)
On the way from Agra to Jaipur, we stopped at Fatehpur Sikri. This is a magnificently fortified ghost city with a beautiful mosque and an abandoned palace. I just have to explain how difficult it is to walk from the car to wherever it is you are going. The moment that you leave your car/hotel someone will approach you (only one person at a time if you are lucky) and try to sell something to you or beg for money while they are literally hanging onto your clothes. A guy once walked up to us, tried to put a wilted flower in my hand so that he can charge me for it! There is not a moment of solitude or silence.
Besides the awe of the buildings, the only other interesting experience was the shoe-watching-scam! When entering the mosque, you need to take your shoes off and leave them outside the building. When we took our shoes off, a guy took them from us and put them on the floor right in front of us. He did not ask to watch our shoes, I thought it was a bit strange that he took the shoes from my hands and put them down in front of me, as I could have done this myself! When we returned, he insisted on being paid for watching our shoes 
We arrived in Jaipur around 17:00 and then checked into the guesthouse that our driver picked out for us. We drank tea on the veranda and watched the millions of kites flying through the air. Kids were running around, chasing after the fallen kites to retrieve their trophies. “Tomorrow is holy day, all the kids fly kites…” we were told. From the other side of the street, a shop had assembled two gigantic speakers on the roof with Indian songs (and the odd one or two western songs) blaring from them.
The room was the cleanest and newest room we have stayed in for months, but looks can be deceiving…the staff was very unhelpful when we told them that we had no running water in our room. This was finally fixed four hours later and I had to go to bed with soaking-wet hair. We ordered dinner at 18:30 (mixed vegetables, as they were out of chicken and potatoes) and at 20:00 we had no dinner yet. On following up, we were informed that they had forgotten about our dinner…we had dinner at 21:00. So when we were waken by the speakers from across the street and again had no water the next morning, we insisted that the driver take us to another place.
Day 2 in Jaipur was a fun-filled adventure! The new guesthouse was good; we could at least wash our faces before heading to Amber, a small town just outside Jaipur. We visited the Amber fort, set on top of a hill and surrounded by a lake on the one side and a great-wall-of-china-like wall on the other.
Jaipur is also known as the Pink City due to the Old City’s pink-coloured buildings. Jaspal dropped us at the City palace, from where we had to walk to all the sites and back to our guesthouse - ooohhhh a day out in the town all by ourselves ? The best part of the City Palace was the armoury - a fantastic collection of traditional Indian weapons. As you enter, fearsome daggers spell out the ‘WELCOME’ sign!
Next up was the Wind Palace - I really have nothing to say about this highly overrated palace! The locals even thought that Eon and I were more interesting than the palace, taking pictures of us and with us… We walked down the buzzing streets and into some shops - I ended up buying the coolest pink ‘leather’ shoes. And then we walked straight into heaven: LMB confectionary. They have a stunning display of all kinds of Indian sweets. And you can taste whatever you want. We ended buying a box of sweets for Rs120.
On the way back to the guesthouse, Eon just could not resist the temptation and he bought four kites, a spindle and some string. As soon as we got to the guesthouse, he was on the rooftop and with the help of the Indian kids, had his kite flying high!
At sunset, we had an amazing fireworks show. All over town, people were shooting off enormous fireworks - we finally had a ‘Happy New Year’ feeling! This lasted for at least two hours.
All and all, our Jaipur experience was out of this world!
Click on image to view Fatepur Sikri and Jaipur gallery: