Sun, Nov 15: Jaipur

After breakfast in the lovely dining room overlooking the hotel grounds we headed out for a day of sightseeing.

Jaipur is known as The Pink City.  It was thus named for the light terra cotta color used on many of the buildings.  At the time the city was built the Maharaja called the color pink and of course the Maharaja is always right so the color is called pink. 

The first stop today was actually just outside of Jaipur at the Amber Fort, one of the prettiest forts we have seen in India.  There were actually two forts...one that looked older and less picturesque at the very top of the hill and overlooking the city and surrounding countryside.

The Amber Fort was located just below the old fort...but still high on a hill overlooking a large lake with a garden complex built into it.  

Amber Fort Gardens.

One can climb the long footpath up to the fort...

or take an elephant.  We all took the elephant.  While in line to get our elephant we were inundated with sellers of all types of wares.  They don’t seem to take no for an answer.  One is supposed to ignore them.  If you look at them or acknowledge them then they know you know they are there and they keep pitching their wares.  If you say no, they take it as maybe so they keep pressuring.  One must give them credit for persistence.

There was a constant stream of elephants heading up to the gates.  Our guide did indicate that there was a limit to the number of trips a day that each elephant could take, to help protect them. 

The views from the fort of the surrounding village and city walls were pretty impressive.  The walls were particularly impressive and very extensive.

The fort was very interesting with a large courtyard where all the elephants unloaded the guests...

beautiful architecture and details on the facades...

a lovely interior garden courtyard...

and lots of murals and mosaics on the walls...

The guide even pointed out an interesting feature that allowed one to take pictures of oneself in one of the mirrors on the wall.

We then piled into tuk-tuks for a drive through town..

to Chand Baori, the old stepwell in the near-by village of Abhaneri.  Many areas of India have stepwells with steps along the well sides down to the water level.  This one was huge with around 3500 steps crisscrossing three of the four walls to get to the water (fourth side has a temple).  The well depth is 100 feet and at the time we visited the water level was pretty low so you could see a lot of the steps.  In this case, the walls looked very much like one of those Escher prints where steps going down seem to end up at the top.  Amazing.

There is also another large lake in Jaipur that had a water palace.  The palace, Jal Mahal, was built on land and then a dam constructed to allow the lake to fill up.  

After getting back on the bus at this stop we were joined by a young magician, maybe 8 or 10, who performed a few magic tricks in the aisle.  Of course we all then gave him tips.  

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And our driver handed around coconuts with coconut water as refreshments.  Tara swears by it.

After lunch our next stop was the Jantar Mantar observatory built by Maharaja Jai Singh II.  It is one of five built between 1724 and 1735 by the Maharaja and is the biggest and best preserved observatory.  The observatory consists of nineteen instruments for measuring time, predicting eclipses, tracking location of major stars as the earth orbits around the sun, ascertaining the declinations of planets, and determining the celestial altitudes and related ephemerides. 

It had an incredible number of astronomical and astrological “instruments”...

And also had one instrument for each astrological sign.  Rashi Valaya Yantra has 12 gnomon dials that measure ecliptic coordinates of stars, planets and all 12 constellation systems, each instrument becoming operative when a different one of the 12 zodiacal constellations straddles the meridian.  We found everyone's individual astrological sign instrument.  These two were for Scorpio and Cancer.

There were two sun dials with graduated scales for capturing the shadows.  The Vrihat Samrat Yantra sundial is the world’s largest sundial at 88 feet high and can measure time to within 2 seconds.  

The “small” one is one-fourth the size of the large sundial (about 22 feet high) can measure time to within 20 seconds accuracy.  

The entire complex was pretty interesting and impressive but baffling for the non-astrologically trained.

More photos of the Jantar Mantar Observatory.

Our next stop was a visit with Tara's 'brother' who owns a fabric store. And boy was that an experience. We started out with an empty work surface and bam! by the end of our buying session it was covered a foot deep with scarves, shirts and all sorts of other clothes. We were probably there for an hour and a half while they kept pulling out new possibilities.  Most of us bought at least a few items for gifts (or ourselves).

If we were interested we could have bought a chicken for dinner from the shop right next door.

When we got back to the hotel we were met by festive greeters...

and then we all packed again, because Tara did her thing and got us all 'upgraded' to the old, grand wing of our hotel.  

Our last stop was dinner at a new hotel.  It was essentially a site visit at the Grand Uniara Heritage Hotel and Tara was being woo'd by management.  Boy, do they want her business. The hotel still needed some work, construction is wrapping up, but it actually was quite nice and the very good dinner for all of us was on the house.  They offered us these radioactive mock tails.   Not that great and scary looking. Thankfully the rest of the meal was top notch.