Up at 4am for the 5:10am train. Me, Ahn Jong and Greta said goodbye to Alex who was going to Varanase. Another journey in the sleeper carriage with the locals and Indian tourists. The terrain becoming noticably different now heading further west into dryer, desert zone. Arrived at 9am into pretty much a dust cloud. You could feel it in your lungs when breathing! A little messing about with guest houses and finding one for the right price. Me and Ahn Jong opted to share a double and Greta had a single. Greta decided to stay and sleep for a while, feeling sick from Delhi still, so me and Ahn Jong donned masks and headed out to the pink city. The pollution, dust, heat and tiredness from an early start was so overwhelming after 2 hours of walking about we decided to bail back to the guesthouse and get some sleep.
Later Ahn Jong decided to leave Jaipur, leaving me with a double room to myself - thanks buddy! He'd already been there a few years before and wanted to go somewhere new - he's been a great travel companion the past few days and I hope to go and see him in Seoul sometime.
Next day me and Greta head out with a French couple (Xavier and Lau) we'd met the night before. Squashing into a tuk-tuk we zoom off into the pink city, which is actually orange. We decided to head to Pushkar tomorrow morning first thing so we need to cram EVERYTHING into today. We see everything there is to see in the pink city (the observatory is particularly fascinating) and at 4pm jump on a local bus to the epic Amber fort, which is yellow.
Being almost the only foreigners we're pretty much the main attraction in the fort, more than the fort itself it seemed sometimes! I lose track of how many photo's there were taken with/of us. Huge families have individual pictures, big group shots, small group shots, men only shots, women only shots, children shots. I can now imagine how tiring it must be to be a celebrity, and never want to be one!
Exhausted from our new-found fame we leave and jump on a bus back to the pink city. On the bus we meet some (fluent) Italian speaking Indians (wearing designer shoes) who see this opportunity to practice their Italian, basically talking AT Greta for an hour.
Ah, poor Greta. I had a similar experience in Saigon when the director of a university plonked himself down next to me to practice his English ahead of a speech he was to give in Moscow. He was extremely pleased when I taught him the word 'prostitute' and merrily typed it into his phone "for later". Hmm... He was a very interesting man, I consider myself somewhat an expert on the Vietnamese education system now, but after nearly two hours my ears were hurting and I made an excuse to leave.
ReplyDelete