The Pink City

Saturday 12th April

- Hawa Mahal
- the streets of Jaipur

after breakfast (provided, somewhat average, but with some peelable fruit, always a bonus) we walked up to one of the gates of Jaipur's Pink City. if there are a lot of the old main walls remaining, we must have not found them yet. many of the buildings are indeed of a specific and quite deep terracotta, in different and combined hues of orange, rose and pink, depending how recently it has been freshened up. there were a lot of active shrines on the walk up the main road, with some highly persistent street kids demanding money. we also saw the first actual instance of alms giving; perhaps we've been looking in the wrong direction. quite a lot of staring, as usual.


Jaipur seems to wake a little later than Agra or Delhi, so we could see all of the bazaars opening up. it's a city famed worldwide for gems, textiles and handicrafts, with its regular, grid pattern streets - the first such avenues we have seen - each specialising in one trade and selling effectively one class of goods. we walked past a whole street selling nothing but sewing machines, another ironmongery, and so on. as for gems, well, you'd really need to be an expert to buy them here - the varieties are extraordinary, as no doubt are all of the possible pitfalls. the shops clearly sell to residents as well as wholesalers and tourists, so there is an almost bewildering choice and range. we looked for an antique textile bazaar about which we had read, but the road that we did find was not that impressive. however, we did find a chemist or two and stocked up with fairly hefty antibiotic and local stomach cures, a fair shedload of drugs for slightly less than one pound.

on the way, we found and decided to tour the Hawa Mahal or 'Place of the Winds.' Jaipur was built by Jai Singh II in 1727, the ruler of the hard to spell Kachchwara royal family, one of the more famous Rajasthan dynasties. this all linked in nicely with our learned history so far, as his family was one of the first to align itself with out old friends the Mughals. the Hawa Mahal is not really a palace, more of a five story screen, built in 1799 to allow women of the court to watch street processions while remaining hidden away in strict purdah.

the Hawa Mahal, Jaipur

the front is right on one of the main roads, a newly repainted-looking orange-pink structure of countless balconies and small screened windows that makes it appear much bigger than it is. we managed to locate the entrance at the back and went inside. although our guidebook was less than impressed with the gutted and rather empty shell of this narrow building, we enjoyed it a lot, especially the fact that it really did seem to create its own cooling breezes through its perforated structure.

the views from the top were naturally impressive. looking back, the imposing Nahargarh fortress overlooks the city from a steep ridge in the middle distance, while the yellow rather than pink Royal Place and surrounds - still in use by the royal family - are spread out not too far below you.

Jantar Mantar observatory, with the 'Heaven Piercing' Minaret in the distance.

the views through the screens give you license to observe and note goings on in the street from a position of anonymity, a welcome change to our day-to-day street experiences.

the Hawa Mahal is being restored and repainted / recovered on the rear-facing side, so it appears to be held up from behind by nothing more than a precarious bamboo and wood scaffold. but with its cooling rooms, some with remaining fragments of interior decoration, and vast numbers of fine yet secluded vantage points, it's a total success in terms of form and function.

stick banging at the Hawa Mahal - we couldn't figure out what they were doing either.

we had a really good walk along the south wall through one of the textile bazaars, although the untrained eye would have difficulty telling quality from not. the fact that everything appears to start at an opening price of R100 was amusing, though. we didn't buy anything on this run through the very colourful cotton and silk streets of Jaipur, bur we did get a useful education as to what there was available.

spice shop, Jaipur.

we grabbed a rickshaw and headed south, passing our hotel on the way to the famous Anokhi block-printed textile showroom, something Phil had been very keen to check out. the change from the vibrant street markets was really a shock, replaced by air-conditioned, upper-middle class, Bond Street style fixed-price shopping. we now think that Edd might have had a bit of heatstroke, but he found the whole experience highly disorienting, as rich Indians took their time picking out clothes and accessories, wearing high heeled or wedge shoes that appeared to have never walked the streets that we had left only moments ago. we had a lunch of sorts in the attached cafe, merely adding to Edd's genuine sense of spinning out, since it was only full of clearly very well off Westerners and serving up 'safe' blue cheese and walnut salads or brie and tomato sandwiches. how had we managed to leave India by entering this store? sadly, their men's section was only tokenistically stocked, so Edd did not even have the diversion of possible retail therapy to distract him from his excessive double-taking! we hailed yet another rickshaw back to the Diggi, where we laid down and immediately slept for a couple of hours, waylaid by the heat.

it's all too much for this cycle rickshaw driver.

in the late afternoon, we walked out for a short stroll in the nearby Ram Niwas Gardens, which were a bit scrubby to be described as 'gardens.' the colonial relic of the Central Museum at its centre was closed for renovation, something it clearly could do with. its Victorian-style terraces and pavilions certainly harked back to a different time.

our park relaxation was, yet again, interrupted by tiresome groups of young Indian men trying to surreptitiously take Philippa's picture, before plucking up the courage to ask Edd directly. it's become so common that we mostly just ignore it, but sometimes it can only be described as intrusive.

street snacks, Jaipur

we ate late, Philippa not quite on top form health-wise. we seem to be taking the weather with us - a most impressive storm with horizontal forked lightning and hard rain sprang up, crashed down and slid off, all in the space of 30 minutes. replete and refreshed, we went to bed happy yet tired.

our journey seems to be proceeding at a slower pace than our heavily itinerised schedules in Delhi and Agra, although both of those cities do have a huge number of things to see. having said that, Jaipur still has a great deal to show us, particularly in its outlying areas, it seems to possess a distinctly industrious, more organised air than our previous locations, boasting many a wide street, covered terracotta-coloured arcades and a visible, richer resident Indian community among the usual traffic chaos, smells and, of course, poverty. a planned visit to the City Palaces tomorrow will no doubt reveal another more exalted layer of the Pink City's community.

best

edd & philippa