Time to move on. We spent most of the day travelling from Jaipur to Jodhpur which turned out to be more interesting than it sounds.

People drive on the left over here, except when they don’t. That turns out to be remarkably often.

As with the journey from Delhi to Jaipur, the trip from Jaipur to Jodhpur is basically a couple of long motorway class roads.

• Except that lorries tend to drive in the right hand lane and expect people to pass on the inside.
• There are speed bumps at major intersections that would rip the bottom off your car if you don’t slow down.
• On more than one occasion we saw trucks and scooters coming towards us on the wrong side of the carriageway.,
• And we saw a goat herder trying to get his flock of goats across two lanes of busy motorway.

And everybody acts as though this is perfectly normal, so it is.

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Today was our final day in Jaipur and we went to see some more of the sites.

Highlights included a mother trying to drop a brick on her son’s foot, a Stepping Well, the Amber Palace, a palace in a lake, wild monkeys and Dave becoming a power guru with karma.

We were trying to get to the Amber Palace which is Jaipur’s number one tourist attraction. Unfortunately so was everyone else.  The palace is, inevitably, at the top of a hill and there are only three ways in. You can walk, you can take an elephant ride or you can drive up.

The elephant option looks good fun but animal rights groups have criticised the use of elephants because carrying passengers can cause them lasting injuries. Walking up ran the risk of causing lasting injuries to us so we opted instead for driving up.

The road in is one way, narrow and bottlenecks at various stages. We got stuck for half an hour or so but it proved very fortuitous as we were right outside a Stepping Well. We’ve never seen one before and I was blown away by the architecture which looks like something out of an Escher drawing. You wouldn’t want to use the water now but people used to get all of their water from here. And in times of attack, the local royalty used to hide their treasure in the pool.

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Opposite the well there was a temple which overlooked a few houses. The women do a lot of the hard work in India and I counted one of the two women carrying nine bricks in a bowl on her head. It would have been ten but one fell out as she was struggling to lift it up, just narrowly missing her bare footed son who was trying to help.

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The Amber Palace itself was well worth the effort. It’s about seven miles outside of Jaipur, built of sandstone and marble around 1592 and laid out on four levels. In the King’s quarters there was an early form of air conditioning with holes in the walls allowing air to blow onto flowing water that ran through a channel in the floor. Rose petals were added to the water to give what the audio tour described as ‘a scented cascade throughout the palace’.

Further in there was the ladies only area. The queen lived on one side and the other ladies of affection lived on the other. There was a discreet passageway to the rear allowing the ladies of affection to attend to the King’s needs without being seen by the Queen although as one tourist commented pithily, she probably didn’t give a ****.

Not only did the architects come up with air conditioning, they were also masters of camouflage. The arched courtyard was seen as a potent symbol of power back in the day and the Mughal enemy decided it needed to be destroyed. The cunning locals saw the Mughals coming, draped the area with bland fabric and the Mughals were so surprised how boring it all was they just turned around and went home. That’s what the audio tour said anyway so it must be true.

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What I really liked about the place was how sociable it all was. People wanted to chat to us and often wanted a photo as well. One person even gave me his hat.

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On the way back from the Amber Palace we stopped off at the Water Palace, Jai Mahal. You can’t visit the site and it’s not clear when it was built but it’s a five storied building, four of which remain underwater when the lake is full. So a little rising damp but at least it’s pretty.

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We finished the day at the Monkey Temple where I was given good karma and turned into a Power Guru by the priests in competing temples.

In case you ever need good karma, the secret is to pour a bowl of water over some marigolds. Then have a priest wave a coconut around your head three times, say a few magic words, tie a bit of string around your wrist, put a blob of dye on your forehead and hold his hand out in a palm up position.

In case you ever need to become a Power Guru it’s much more sophisticated. Instead of the coconut the priest needs to hit you over the head six times with a bunch of peacock feathers with no advance warning.

I’d hate anyone to think this was some sort of money making scan though. When the Guru Giver eventually realised I was telling the truth when I said I had no money on me, he gave me five rupees out of his own pocket for good luck. I couldn’t believe it. The good karma was working already.

If the Monkey Temple was in Britain, the owners would no doubt make sure it was spotless to help draw in the punters. Let’s just say it’s very much not in Britain and leave it at that.

The buildings are impressive enough though and there must be something magical about the water because we saw several people fully immersing themselves in the manky green murk. Personally I’m going to stick to peacock feather flagellation.

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That just leaves the monkeys. And that’s definitely the best thing to do with them. In small numbers they are quite cute. When several hundred of them come running down the steps towards you in one go, it’s quite another thing. The noise on the ground as they ran, the calls and hisses they made and their obvious individual and collective strength made me begin to wonder about the efficacy of my power
guru-ness. Shame on me. The good karma kept me safe.

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Today was a touristy day. Annette wanted to get some tops made so we started with a deliberate shopping trip to a fabric place recommended by our driver. The visit started with a demonstration of block printing where two guys were doing three-stage prints on long lengths of fabric at hugely impressive speeds. It then turned out that the company had a much bigger hand printing place out of the city but no-one every went there because of the distance so they brought people in to the city to do the demonstrations instead. We ended up with a very nice block printed elephant at no charge. I’m not sure the elephant is too happy.

The shop itself was an emporium of quite stunning fabrics and we had the now ritual ‘please … sit down, let me tell you about …..’. At first it feels like a hassle when all you want to do is browse around but I’m starting to warm to the idea that it might actually be a genuine courtesy as well as a softening up exercise.

Annette decided on two different fabrics and a pattern she liked, we did the bartering, they measured her up and five hours later she picked up two hand made tops that she’s delighted with. We’ve not really been in enough shops yet to know if what we paid was a good deal or not but when I was out of the way, the guy who was serving us asked Annette what I did for a job, said ‘that explains things’ and that a good deal is when both parties come out feeling slightly unhappy.  I think that meant we did okay.

I must be going soft though. When I came to pay I included an extra fiver as a Diwali gift in the hope that it helped the shop have a prosperous and affluent year. Surprisingly, it made the heart feel good.

We used to be able to buy milk fresh from the farm on the Isle of Wight until people were hospitalised because the milk hadn’t been pasteurised. No such risk here. On the way from the shop we saw people on scooters carrying churns of milk directly from the farm to the shops. Our driver was rightly proud of how quickly the milk got from the farm to the consumer and told us that the way the buyers test the quality of the milk is by putting their finger in it. If the milk stays on the finger above the nail when they pull their finger out, it’s okay. If it drains off below the nail it’s not acceptable. Good to know!

Apparently there are royal families all over the place in India, often with more than one in each state. The Royal family in Jaipur live in the Crystal Palace and we opted for a guided tour so that we could get into some of the private rooms. It was all very interesting and definitely worth the visit but my favourite snippet of information was about Maharaja Jai Singh who took the throne in 1699 at the age of just 11.

He was by all the accounts of his PR team, much wiser and wittier than most people of his age and an equally brave soldier. A Mughal emperor bestowed upon him the title of ‘Sawai’ which meant 1.25 times superior to his contemporaries. The title adorns his descendants to this day.

I love the precision of that. One and a quarter times as smart as other people.

I also love how the precision is reflected in the palace. The royal flag flies all the time but if the Royal family is at home, they also fly a second flag above the first with the second flag being exactly one quarter the size of the first.

There’s another hidden gem in Jaipur, not far from the Crystal Palace, known as Jantar Mantar. That should be the name of a character in Star Wars but it is in fact the Astronomical Observatory of Jaipur which was started in 1727 to enable Maharaja Jai Singh identify auspicious dates. It houses numerous astrological instruments including sundials, and water clocks and if that sounds dull, try this. The Great Equatorial Sun Dial is 44 meters long and 27 meters high. That not only makes it the world’s largest sun dial, it shows the time to an accuracy of two seconds.  

Not much use as a wrist watch though.

There’s a third famous place in Jaipur called the Palace of the Winds and a café opposite called the Wind View Café. The Palace was built in 1799. It has 953 windows and was built as part of the woman’s section of the City Palace to allow the ladies to watch the streets below unobserved whilst remaining cool from the breeze blowing through the latticework. Our driver told us there was nothing inside worth seeing and we were getting weary by that point so we just viewed it from the café on the other side of the road.

Four floors up, past a very persistent jewellery shop owner who kept coming and telling us (based on no knowledge whatsoever) that our food was nearly ready and that we could then we visit his shop on the way down. The food was good, the steps worth the effort …. but the noise. The combination of street music, the beeping of car horns and the noise of people below meant that we had to shout   to the waiter what we wanted to eat. Exciting and invigorating certainly. Restful … not at all.

More fireworks tonight. These guys really are happy to see us.

We’d arranged for a driver and car to take us around for our trip, which sounds grand but is incredibly cost effective. He picked us up on time, drove us the 260km from Delhi to Jaipur and dropped us off at our hotel. So not the most thrilling way to spend the day.

Except that there is always something to learn from looking out of the window.

It’s basically two roads from Delhi to Jaipur, all toll motorway and all a microcosm of the preconceptions I’ve brought with me about the country.  Most of the first 100km or so is completely built up along the side of the road with a combination of shanty shops in what appear to be half length garages, accommodation and rubbish heaps. But interspersed with those at frequent intervals are medium rise apartment blocks, one-off modern hotels, entrances to industrial parks and upmarket shops such as a Jaguar car show room.

There are also huge numbers of petrol stations and truck depots. I tried counting the trucks for a while but had to give up. There were never fewer than fifteen or twenty vehicles at a time, sometimes three of four times that number with depots no more than ten minutes apart and often much more frequently than that. There were some trucks on the road but most were laid up because of the Diwalhi holiday. They will all be back out there on Tuesday and that has to add up to thousands of trucks normally on this one road every day.

It makes you think. We might be trying to save the planet one lightbulb at a time in the UK but we’ve not got a chance of tackling global change until we can bring the big players into the game. Delhi has a population of 20m, Jaipur has 5m and that’s more than a third of the UK population right there. India as a whole has some 20 billion

The scale of global change needed was not a perspective I was expecting this early in the trip.

Once we’d got over the half way mark, things became more rural. There was one area in particular that felt very calm and special for no obvious reason and then the feeling disappeared. Shortly afterwards our driver, Santos pulled over to feed the local monkeys and also shared some bottles of water with kids who came up to the car. When we were talking about this afterwards he explained he often did it ‘because it made his heart feel good’.

Jaipur itself dates back to the 12^th century and was the first planned city in Northern India. The guide book says it was planned in a grid system of seven blocks of buildings with straight avenues lined with trees with the whole area surrounded by high walls pierced with ten gates. That’s true and the area has a lot of chaotic charm but it does belie the growth that’s taken place beyond the walls which has led to daily jousts as scooters, cars, and tuk-tuks battle to get in through the gates.

The guide book also says that the buildings are uniformally rose pink and that the colour was chosen after several experiments to cut down the intense glare from the reflection of the blazing rays of the sun. Terracotta orange would be closer to the mark but pink apparently symbolises welcome, so pink it is.

Today was the actual celebration of Diwali, the Hindu festival of light, symbolising the spiritual victory of light over darkness, good over evil, knowledge over ignorance and fireworks over sleep. We had dinner in the hotel’s open air roof top restaurant and seemed to be at the centre of firework displays all around the city which lasted from around 7.30pm until well after one in the morning. It’s all supposed to be about worship to Lakshmi, the goddess of prosperity and wealth. We just thought it was good of them to lay it on for us.

We started to get our bearings a bit today. There’s Old Delhi and there’s New Delhi with New Delhi actually being quite stylish and dating back to the British colonial era of the 20s and 30s and Old Delhi being something else.

We paid a visit to the famous Red Fort in Old Delhi which is, well a big red fort really, and then we tried to visit the Mosque across the road which can hold 25,000 people at a time. The visit to the fort was strange go start with. If you want to pay by card or via an online method, you can go directly to the entrance. If you want to pay by cash, you have to walk around a kilometre to the other end of the site to buy a ticket and then walk all the way back again to the main entrance.

It’s almost as though they are trying to tell you something, except they are aren’t because there are no signs about this anywhere. So it comes down to the kindness of strangers to work out what you’re meant to do.

Then when it comes to getting in to the place men and women have to go through different entry points. It’s not a gender issue as such but more because every public space seems to have security checks. The entry points for men have men doing the checks and the entry points for women have women doing the checks.  That’s all very reasonable and sensible but it later dawned on us that travel on the metro is very definitely male orientated with something like 95% of the travellers being men. There’s also a strong bias towards it being men on the streets.

Anyway, back to the fort. Think Warwick Castle in red stone, minus the walk along ramparts and you get the idea. It was built when the then King decided to move the capital of India from Agra (home of the Taj Mahal) to Delhi. His daughter subsequently decided to build a pool between there and the mosque so that she could see the moon reflected in it from the fort. Utterly charming I’m sure until the British turned up and tore it apart.

I’ve never been to a mosque before so the idea of visiting India’s largest was quite exciting. I’ve still not been to a mosque. There’s an incredibly busy road that runs between the fort and the mosque and you take your life in your hands trying to get across. There was a zebra crossing where we needed to be but in India it turns out that just marks you down as fair game. Not only do the vehicles not stop for people, the motorbikes coming the other way think it’s fun to come down the wrong side of the road to try and score a few extra points.

The mantra we’ve been given elsewhere for roads like this is ‘be brave, keep walking, don’t go back’. The Delhi version is ‘be brave, stop gibbering, be prepared to stop, scream leap out of the way, and keep praying’. Not as pithy but a lifesaver.

As for the mosque itself, once we got across the road, we ended up heading down an increasingly dodgy back street immediately behind the site. People were pushing and shoving and it just didn’t feel safe. In the end we bailed out. If God wants to see me, he can pay me a visit on the Isle of Wight. At least it’s easier to get across the roads.

We decided to treat the rest of the day as an acclimatisation period. That’s code for go back to the hotel, sit by the pool and drink cocktails. And watch the red kites.  There’s a family of them that fly around the hotel and dive bomb the pool area for food. It’s an impressive sight seeing a bird of prey flying off into a tree with a crockery plate.

There’s a really useful tip to remember when you first arrive in a new country – the first day is always the most expensive.

It’s difficult and pricey to buy rupees outside of India so we arrived last night without any cash. The first job today then was to find an ATM machine.

We’d decided to treat ourselves to somewhere nice to stay for the start of our holiday so when we asked the concierge where the nearest ATM was, he decided he was going to show us the way. We hadn’t reckoned on the fact that, because it’s the start of Diwali, the service tills would all be out of cash. Four machines later and we were in luck, with luck being a negotiable concept given the dodgy looking building we were in and the fact that our genial host felt the need to cover our backs while we used the machine.   

Then what to do? Delhi is a huge city and without any real sense of where we were we jumped into a tuk-tuk and asked for the local shopping area. It’s possible that there were cousins and brothers of the driver involved but somehow we ended up in a store that claimed to be a ‘temporary place’ for a nationally sponsored centre shopping centre helping tribal families in remote areas.

I’ve no idea if that’s true – but they did have very nice carpets.

Actually I was blown away. I had no idea that traditionally, carpets are made by hand one knot at a time. The best have a double back, last for two to three hundred years (which will probably see me out) and look better and better with use.

What was really special was that because of the way the knots are tied and trimmed they lie down at around 45 degrees. That means that when you turn the carpet from end to end, the colours change in quite a dramatic fashion. And the guys in the store were really very good at rotating 3m rugs around to show the effect.

In case you’re wondering, we didn’t succumb. But it was close.

Welcome to India, home of the Maharajas’, tuk-tuks and more traffic at midnight than in London at midday. This is the start of Dave and Annette’s tour of bits of India.

The flight out from the UK was surprisingly okay, made all the more passable by the film ‘Yesterday’ about a world with no Beatles, ‘Downsizing’ with a 5 inch Brad Pitt and mini-magnums half way through the journey. We arrived at Delhi airport around 11.30pm, battled our way through the joys of immigration and out in to the brave new world.

Delhi airport is the first place I’ve been to where it takes the nationals three times longer to get through immigration that it does foreigners. As ever though, there were the sweet, welcoming and smiley faces of immigration to enjoy first. There must be an international baccalaureate on how to look grumpy and disinterested for all these international ambassadors.

The airport is to Delhi as Gatwick is to London so we had a forty minute drive into city. There were five lanes official lanes of traffic on our side of the road that were chock a block with drivers turning them into seven or eight lanes whenever they got the chance. That’s at 1am. Bonkers.