The two morals of today are:
- Always bring your phone charger, no matter how short a trip it is. Even if your phone has always lasted this long on battery before. Just bring it.
- Don’t judge bad text message grammar or assume it is the phone’s fault. It doesn’t mean the important part is wrong. Even if it really looks wrong.
Breakfast at the hotel had a nice selection of Western and Indian options, including freshly-made omelettes, which I enjoyed one of. I saw a woman touching a parantha (fried flatbread, sort of like naan, but usually with onions and peppers cooked in) with her fingers before deciding on another one. I could go on rant after rant about PEOPLE TOUCHING MY FOOD. Even people in the food service industry. It has gotten to the point where if I see someone use tongs, gloves, etc, I think they are extra awesome and will patronize them again, even though that should be par for the course hygiene-wise. Oddly, my co-workers for example, were super careful not to touch the cake we got when we all celebrated Sachin Tendulkar’s birthday. (Yes, my co-worker bought a cake and we all wished India’s most famous cricket player a happy birthday after lunch.) So my co-workers get it. Why don’t people in the actual industry?
The front desk took about half an hour to arrange it, but eventually we got ourselves a driver for the day in a comfortable, air-conditioned vehicle. Then it was off to the Forts of Jaipur! Which would make a good name for a band.
If you come to Jaipur someday and can only see one fort, see Amber Fort. (Or Amer Fort depending on which guide book you are reading.)
View of Amber Fort
(from the next fort up, but I’m cheating and putting this photo first)
Amber Fort is huge. Enormous. I mean, look at the place. Also, it has lots of great views of the little town below (which I’m not sure is part of Jaipur or not) and I’m a sucker for a view. Even cooler? You can see old fort walls on hilltops in the distance that look remarkably like the Great Wall.
View from Amber
(…to the Great Wall of Jaipur?)
Now it is time for…Trapped in a Photo Shoot, Part 1
Photos of people who have photos of me
As it has happened to me in many tourist sites in India, I became part of the destination.
As soon as I was standing in one place being taken a photo of, it became the thing to do. I don’t mind at all when it is cute kids, but two of these four dudes thought it was totally fine to put their arm around me when they were posing. (It seems like a lot of guys must want a photo of a foreign girlfriend? Because it is rarely just a group photo of “Hey, look it’s us with a white person,” it always seems to be individual photos.) I guess part of me is flattered, but I’m mostly baffled. Lately, if I have an opportunity, I have been asking to take photos of the people who have just been photographing me (and as a courtesy I usually show them on my camera afterward, which I’ve noticed people tend to like.) Hence all my photos of random people.
More of the Pretty
The Amber Fort Palace Museum
Trapped in a Photo Shoot, Part 2.
I took a picture of this group early on. But they got me back!
It was either a group of families or a big, extended family touring the fort together. They had me surrounded on a walk overlooking the garden and I found myself being posed with one woman, than someone’s daughter, then being introduced to a grandfather on the other side, then a picture shaking hands with the husband, then a group photo, then a photo with grandmother and youngest child. It was actually quite amusing and totally harmless, though I seriously had no way to escape gracefully, so I just waited it out. Probably a dozen or two people either wanting to be involved in the photo-taking or being in the photo itself were all around me. I was in so many photos.
(Ha, Pete is trapped in a photo shoot, too.)
The best part of Amber Fort was yet to come. The final area was not as pretty and decorated as the Palace part. And it did not have quite as many views. But it was fun.
Amber Fort: The place that wants you to get lost
You could wander for hours in here and have no idea where you are, I loved it! Corridors, stairwells, rooms that led to other rooms that led to balconies. No symmetry, no order, just lots of paths to try. I can’t believe we found each other at the end.
Amber Fort: The place that makes you ask, “How the heck did you get over there?”
Side note: the exploring has a limit, as one member of our party found out the hard way.
Climbing a bit higher to get a good photo, there was eye contact with a guard, who then appeared at the location very shortly later. Despite the lack of signage restricting anything, the guard took an elbow and wanted to take the “guilty” party to the “control room.” Luckily, the guard was not very aggressive and let me slip between him and the rogue photographer. I then took my time walking down the stairs and taking photos, leaving him stuck behind me for longer than he wanted to be. After that, getting lost in the maze was no problem.
The central courtyard
(…where you can attempt to orient yourself when you come upon it, or just make yourself more confused.)
Time for another fort.
Take the road above Amber even higher into the mountains…
…up to the top.
Although Jaigarh Fort is a smaller fort with less interior space (more functional as a fort, less as a palace or living space) I found it to be photogenic. (And pink.) Someone must agree since they were setting up a wedding in one of the courtyards. It was much less crowded than Amber, though. It is mainly famous for having a large 1720s-era cannon on wheels.
Jaigarh Fort: Pinker than Jaipur
Wandering Atop Jaigarh Fort
For all your traveling-on-the-fort needs
There were two sections of the fort. In between the two were a place to buy soda and chips, dress up and get your photo taken, ride a camel, or check out some weapons.
Tourist Camel and a gorgeous green flyer amongst all the pigeons
(The sign I needed at Jaipur Railway Station)
And they are serious. But in the digital age, you just have to press the trash can icon.
It was right here I ran out of photos on my memory card. I had a few, but not many, older photos of my apartment and such, so I went on a delete frenzy and suddenly started being careful. After all, we had one more fort to go!
(Moral 3: bring all your memory cards, sheesh.)
At the tower on the end of the fort
Me and a kid who wanted me to take his photo but without a photo in return!
Awesome view from Jaigarh Fort
The final fort of the day was Nahargarh Fort. This one had the best Jaipur views and, although small, had one cool building that was basically a house, but repeated a dozen times to the side and two deep so that walking through it was constant deja-vu. There’s the courtyard. And again. And again. But the stairwell to exit was not always there. Tricky. This was a later design and so actually had toilets built in (as in, two blocks to put your feet and a rectangular hole with some sort of drainage.)
View from Nahargarh Fort
View back down to Hawa Mahal and Jantar Mantar (sundial place)
We’ve come full circle!
So now it was time to do what we came to do. Go to the birthday party.
The text message I got read exactly: Hotel jaipur haritej, Neer jln marg is the venue of todays party
I figured out “Jaipur Heritage” and found the address of the hotel online ahead of time, thinking I was all prepared. After a drink at the hotel bar, we found an amusing auto driver who implored us to help him expand his business by giving him high reviews on tripadvisor. He spoke great English and was overly friendly. (Had I been alone, I wouldn’t have appreciated his demeanor, but with the three of us, it was funny.) He even stopped at Jaipur’s most famous sweet shop for us and we were able to pick up some of Jaipur’s most famous cake thing (pictured, but I don’t recall the name.)
Jaipur LMB Sweet Shop
So we arrived at the hotel, not too late. But the two men at reception had no idea what we were talking about and spoke very little English. However, they imparted two vital pieces of information. One: that there was another Jaipur Heritage hotel and they knew the rough location and Two: that “jln marg” actually meant something. I get +1 for knowing that “marg” means “avenue” in Hindi but -1 for thinking “jln” must be a typo due to all the other typos in the text message and so ignored it. Grammarnazifail. (Later, my co-worker told me, “That’s why I said JLN marg, because I knew there were two.”)
Unfortunately, it seemed as if the hotel was a good 20km away so we were going to be quite late. We got on another auto that was the slowest auto we’d ever been on. I thought it might be about to break down and when the driver suddenly pulled into a gas station to fill up, I thought lack of fuel might have been the problem. No. We jokingly “raced” with an auto next to us at one point just to see if we could get the driver to speed up a bit. Turned out that we were in some kind of auto that did not go higher than a certain speed (or something.) It was excruciating, especially once we got on the high speed JLN Marg. However, I texted Buddy that we would be late and he responded, “No problem, we are in IST” which, as he explained to me the first week I was here means, “Indian Stretchable Time.”
And on the auto ride is where my phone displayed the message “Your battery level is critical, please turn off your phone to avoid losing data.” This was bad not only in trying to find this party, but also because the only receipt of our train tickets home the next day was a text message! I found out by desperate accident that I could forward a text message so I did that. Then I quickly texted Buddy to see if we could get an address or any more information about the hotel. No response. (Granted, he was likely very busy hosting a party at that point.)
So we got to the closest landmark the other hotel guys had told us about (without that information, we would have been totally lost.) But no sign of Jaipur Heritage. I risked a phone call to Buddy and handed the phone to the auto driver crossing my fingers that the phone lasted. It did, phew.
The auto driver pulled up next to what looked like a hopping party. We exited. My hotel key had fallen to the ground next to the auto, but luckily, Pete saw it and picked it up for me. Then we walked into the party.
Everyone looked at us as we strode in confidently. We looked for our co-worker, the only person we knew. Someone asked what we were doing there and we said we were looking for our co-worker for his daughter’s birthday party.
“This is a wedding,” he said.
D’oh. That was definitely how the night was going. We walked out; I was quite embarrassed. Normally, I would have responded to the fact that people were looking at us like we did not belong, except that people are always looking at us.
We walked until we saw a nearby sign with the word “Heritage” in it and eventually found the entrance. Two parties were happening within. We hesitantly walked into one. And there we were! We found it! (And after all that, we still were not late for dinner.)