(Confidentially I will tell you that the good people running Blogger have just updated the editor. It does work much better it seems, and the standard post pictures are much bigger (at last, thank you blogger) but the process of working out how to sequence these photos - man 20 years ago I would have been taking this laptop for a swim in the hotel pool - come to think of it 20 years ago laptops did not exist. Enjoy Jaipur)
Jaipur is not called the Pink City for nothing – it is genuinely pink – and amazing in every respect. We entered the city through a mountain pass, which you descend to a beautiful lake, in the middle of which is a palace – the Lake Palace – it’s a good forewarning of what is to come – scale, detail and colour beyond anything which I have seen before.
The palaces and castles and history are incredible; all of it in this arid mountainous topography, under azure sky – huge, desolate, fantastic – a monster Karoo, with mountains, and castle upon castle.
We took an elephant up to one of the castles. If you click on the photo above you will get an idea of scale - the wall just goes on and on, over the mountains, over the horizon. Elephants are quite an interesting form of transport. They go up steps for example (and on the streets of Jaipur - chaotic - they have serious right of way). I would not describe its rocking and rolling as particularly smooth – but they do have aircon – in the form of the thing waving its trunk up and blasting you with a cool jet of air and (what I can only conclude were) droplets of elephant snot – I did not see our friendly tusker sucking up any water along the way. Aiden and Evan did not fool around while the Elephant rocked up the steep roads to the castle. I do not have a wide enough angle lens to get in the ellie and us, so you'll have to settle for eyes-closed Aiden, a piece of the structure you sit on, and a bit of traffic in the road ahead.
The castle was utterly enormous – with profound detail, an impossible to imagine scale of art – have a look at the detail on one of the entrances.
Inside was an intergalactic maze of corridors and passages and secret balconies and private little courtyards – utterly disorienting and vast vast vast. The walls of many of the passageways were some sort of detailed polished cretestone (I could not imagine the number of skilled artisans and years this place must have taken to build) creating these fantastic scaled shapes in some places and paths of light transfer and reflection in others.
On the top of the castle was this fantastic courtyard – people and Elephants milling around; how cool is this pop-art finish photo of Ange and Ev?
And of course when we gave him a call when we were ready to go – Raj materialized as if by magic in the courtyard – cool, and calm, smiling for a photo with Aiden and Zebedee (the class Zebra which kids get to take for a week at a time and take pics of for their travel book. I don’t think Zebedee has been to Rajastan before. I was petrified of losing the damn thing – to the extent that I was thinking before we left where I might get an identical one from to take on the trip). Raj epitomised service professionalism - an absolute lesson to anyone providing services to anyone else.
Aiden watches a thunderstorm brewing over Jaipur from a hotel window. Down below, kids played cricket on the rooftops. India had the day before beaten South Africa by one run in the same city.
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