After our breakfast buffet, our driver took the four of us and our Jaipur guide toward my favorite destination in the Pink City: Amber Fort.

On the way, we drove through the Old City. We briefly stopped at arguably the most famous building in the area for photos. This time, it was not covered in scaffolding, hooray!

Hawa Mahal
(scaffolding free)

Back in the car, as we headed toward the hills on the outskirts of the city, our guide asked if we wanted to ride elephants.

Pause.

Sure!

So, we did. It turned out that the elephant ride was an alternate way to get to the entrance of Amber Fort. Convenient! We waited in a line of tourists (since only tourists would pay this kind of price) for maybe half an hour, following the slowly moving people up the stairs, until it was our turn.

We were two-to-an-elephant as we sat on the padded seat and the elephant driver checked the integrity of our 1,000 rupee note.

How to get on an Elephant

Elephants headed up to the Fort

The ride was slow going but enjoyable as the elephant slowly made it’s way up the path. We rocked back and forth a bit as we enjoyed the view.

View from the Elephant

We noticed that, after half a dozen more elephants had started up behind us, there were no more waiting beyond that. At first, we wondered if they did rounds and so they’d wait for the elephants to finish this trip then start over. Later, our guide explained that the elephants only work a few hours a day – these morning cooler hours. Lucked out timing that one!

Almost to the top…

We dismounted on the raised platform. The below sign (which I had also seen on my first trip, but sans elephants) made a bit more sense now.

(…though I still don’t know what one is supposed to do with the complaint against hawkers.)

I bought some bottled water, a bit hesitantly as I’m always paranoid about whether the bottle is sealed. Some touts bugged us. We physically blocked one persistent guy and when he got upset about that, I started talking to him, telling him to leave us be. Our guide told us not to talk to them saying, among other things, that they were uneducated.

Once in the fort, we checked out the palace, pretty gardens, giant gazebo with the mirror tiles, beautiful views back down, and went to the final building with a courtyard that I enjoyed getting lost in during my last visit. Combined with the fact that we had a guide and that a lot of the halls and rooms seemed to be closed or fenced off, it was less an exploratory venture this time, but still an interesting walk through.

Our guide liked to think of clever photos to take using reflections and openings through walls, so we humored him. As we finally were wrapping up our tour and heading back to the non-elephant entrance, a persistent salesman paced me. I realized after a moment that the photos in his hands were of me! They were photos taken while my dad and I were on the elephant. He was asking a ridiculous price (around 1,000 rupees / $20) for two 4×7 photos. I kind of wanted the photos, but not at that price and I knew he couldn’t sell them to anyone else. I finally got them for 200 rupees.

…and don’t forget a cup of coffee on your way out.

Photos in hand, and impressed that the guy was just hanging out at the entrance looking for random people in the pictures an hour later, we searched for our driver and found him in the lower parking lot. The question was: where to next? Every guide likes to recommend the City Palace, but I didn’t get much out of it last time I was here, so the other options were one of the other forts, the inside of Hawa Mahal, and Jantar Mantar.

We decided on the latter because it was the most different of everything we had seen so far. On the way there, we stopped at Lake Palace since it is literally along the main road. After we took the requisite photos of the palace on the lake that one cannot actually enter, we stopped at a coconut stand and had some coconut water!

Cheers!

The family consensus was that although the experience was fun, the water itself wasn’t particularly tasty. So my conclusion is that you will enjoy the coconut experience more fully if you are dripping sweat in the heat of spring or summer and are craving electrolytes like no one’s business than in the mild winter when it is just an odd drink you are buying from a dude on the street.

We wandered up to Jantar Mantar, paid the entrance fee, and our guide took us around. I realized that a lot of the impressive sculptures were really just sundials. The urge to cross the boundary or climb the stairs was maddening and family members got whistled at when trying to take photos at a better angle. The condition of the various astronomical instruments had deteriorated somewhat in the six months or so (i.e. pre rainy season) since I’d been here last. Still fun to check it out. Our guide took us over to the sculptures where there was one for every sign on the zodiac. We all posed next to our various sign mascots.

My Sign and I

Afterward, we did something I had really wanted to do during my last visit and that was just wander around in Old Jaipur (the pink part). This was pretty fun and the difference from being in a tourist area and then not was startling. These shops were definitely aimed at locals. Each one seemed to be one specialty, like kitchen implements, silver pots, fabric, art, toys, or paper products. Pretty much no one went out of their way to try to sell us anything! And the prices were reasonable. I bought a Ganesh (elephant-headed figure) picture here.

After that, our guide bade us goodbye and we departed Jaipur and headed back to Delhi, completing the Golden Triangle.

One more stop remained not far out of the city. At a rest stop called Highway King, we had Thanksgiving Dinner!

Turkey Day without the Turkey

We arrived in Delhi late due to not-unpredictable traffic in Gurgaon. My sister realized she was missing her Agra purchases which had been in the car a day or two ago. We looked everywhere, but there was no sign of them, which was a disappointment. There was a street market randomly set up on the side street outside my apartment complex, so we wandered in and checked it out. Lots of toys, shoes, fabrics, scarves, kitchen implements. Very much locals-oriented and fun for that reason. They did not close the road entirely, though, so cars kept speeding through the middle of our market stroll. (We had earlier been one of them.)

The following day, I put my sister on a morning taxi to the airport. Then I went into the office as my dad and brother explored Delhi on their own, visiting Lotus and Iskon just as my sister and I had on her first day. I checked in with the travel agency around 10:30am, telling them what a wonderful trip it had been, but that we lost a gift bag in case anyone happened to stumble upon it. My dad and brother (who kept very careful watch of my only key and my only phone) surprised me in the afternoon by arriving at my office! I never would have believed they had enough information to tell an auto driver how to get there, but they did. With permission, I showed them my desk and introduced them to my team. Then, in the evening, we had a lovely dinner out at Cinnamon Kitchen including our staple of garlic naan as well as some silly, colorful cocktails.

At 10:30pm, twelve hours after I had initially contacted my travel agency, they returned my text message. They believed the lost gifts were found and gave me a phone number!

Saturday was my family’s last full day in Delhi and we spent it doing three interesting, though not really photograph-able, things:

• Finally going to Akshardham! The most photogenic structure in Delhi, but no cameras are allowed. I gained new appreciation for the elephant story that stretched along the bottom panel around the building. We skipped the animatronics show and the paid photo and just wandered.
• Following directions I had received from the man my travel agency told me to contact (called only “Mr. John”). We followed Google’s map to a humble travel office off a side street in the middle of a little commercial neighborhood in Delhi. How surreal was it to be handed the very same items that were lost in a city five hours drive away. Heritage Hotel in Jaipur needs to win award for that kind of customer service!
• Visiting the Major for tea! He had his driver pick us up at the closest metro stop. And my real dad met my surrogate dad. We chatted and then they proceeded to give us so much food, we didn’t need dinner!

And thus concludes my family’s India Trip!