This isn’t that long of a trip in terms of distance, only 255 km (158 miles), but even Google which is always a bit optimistic on drive times, indicates it’s more than four hours. In my case it was five and a half. About every 30 minutes or so, there’s a toll booth to pay, it’s a bit crazy to be honest, the road is mostly not existent most of the time, in fact after the toll booths you are rerouted back to a dirt road the runs parallel to where the “highway” will run if it is ever finished. The way it works now, is they route traffic onto a paved road just before a toll booth, then back off the road and onto the old road right after the toll. More annoying is the frequency of the tolls, since they are around eight cents each time! But, hey I guess it’s putting people to work to collect tolls, so it’s not all bad.
The condition of these roads though is shockingly horrible in places, and I found myself being awed by the durability of the Hyundai, and with the tires especially. As recently as ten years ago, something like this trip I am certain would have resulted in at least one flat tire and it was something I fretted about the entire trip, but in the end I never experienced a flat tire.
After five plus hours of driving though you will feel like you have driven 14 hours in any western country with efficient motorways. After getting turned around in Jaipur a couple of times, finding the road to the Le Meridien Jaipur came more naturally, I was beginning to understand the logic here, already, I’ve gone the wrong way a couple of times myself, because it’s easier than going the long way around.
The Le Meridien Jaipur, isn’t really in Jaipur at all, in fact I’m not sure it should even have Jaipur in the name. But, this is something of a pattern for Le Meridien Hotels, in Paris the call use “Etoile” in the name of the Le Meridien, even though it’s not near the Etoile at all and is in fact more than a kilometer or three metro stops away.
I focus on this dear reader, for good reason: I screwed up, and hope someone benefits from my mistake. I should never have booked this hotel, as my primary intent was to stay in Jaipur for the Holi Festivities, and the Le Meridien’s location was far enough away to make it inconvenient. I’d either have to drive my car there hoping to find parking, or I’d have to hire a hotel car take me. I opted for the latter, but that wasn’t so easy either as the hotel resisted taking me, saying once again “it would not be safe”. When I asked if they were refusing a car and driver because concerned about my safety, they said yes. So, I asked what would be safer for their driver to take me, or for me to drive myself, because I was going to Holi, of that there was no question…they conceded it’d be safer to have their driver take me. The moral of the story, if you’re going to Jaipur for the Holi Festival, book one of the hotels right in town.
Since Jaipur was likely only to be toured now for the brief Holi visit (the hotel had limited me to 2 hours) there isn’t much in the report about the buildings or sites within the town, and rather the focus is on the Amer (Amber) Fort, and the Jaigarh Fort as well as scenes from the village of Amer.
The Amer Palace and Fort is by far the most impressive of all the Forts I visited on this trip to India. A good many tourists will ride an elephant up the narrow road and through the Sun Gate to enter the Fort complex. I did not. It was warm, and I felt bad for the elephants, and also getting into and out of the parking area was worse than trying to leave the Hollywood Bowl after the Fourth of July concert (trust me that’s bad).
Rather I parked on a street in the village of Amer, and walked up the hill to the Fort entrance, and was glad I’d gone that route, when I saw the slow moving conga line of cars trying to leave later on. Amer Fort was begun in 967 by the Meenas, and was taken over by Kachwaha Raijput’s in a cowardly act of shameful conspiracy that left the Meenas massacred “filling the reservoirs in which the Meenas bathed with their dead bodies.” The shame was that this was done when the Meenas were performing rituals of Pitra Trapan on the Diwali, the most important festival in Hinduism, which the Meenas traditionally honored by shedding their weapons.
The Ganesh Pol Entrance is grand and ornate, above which are three screened windows that upon closer examination appear to be carved from thin slabs of marble.
![I gave up trying to get a good picture without crowds of people posing for their own pictures. Photo credit: By Firoze Edassery (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons](http://www.toadswildride.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/1200px-Amer_Fort_Entrance.jpg)
Amer Palace and Jaigarh Fort are basically part of the same complex. Jaigarh Fort, is on the hill top above Amer Palace, and there is an underground connector between the two, that could be used by the royal family to escape should they come under attack. Of interest is that Jaigarh Fort was also home to a cannon foundry. The foundry had a massive wind tunnel that pushed air from the high mountains into its allowing temperatures to reach 2400 °F (1315 °C). The foundry routinely made 16 ft (5 meter) cannons, but 1720 it made the Jaivana Cannon, at the time the world’s largest cannon on wheels. At 20.9 feet (6.15 meters) it fired a 110 lb (50 kg) ball a distance of 22 miles (35 km) using 220 lbs (100 kg) of gun powder! It was only fired that one time, and was never used in battle.
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As I walked back to my car in the Village of Amer, I came across one of the stepped wells that I’d seen so often in films set in India. I was always fascinated by the symmetrical architecture of them, and they’d be used for every from gathering water, to getting relief from the heat.
And I also came across two young boys bathing at a street well pipe. I was trying very hard to be discreet in taking a picture, but when I got back to the hotel that evening and looked closely at the photo, I notice the one boy was looking at me and smiling.
Other sites in the village included a Hindu temple, and ruins of building that clearly must have been most relevant at one time, as well as animals in the street. I don’t think these are things I’d see if I was using a typical tourist service, which I could always find, as they were clearly marked white vehicles that said “TOURIST” over the back window.
My evenings I’d spend at the outdoor café of the Le Meridien for a cold beer, and some very amazing food. I’d have naan bread a few dozen times in my life, but until now I had no idea how it is supposed to taste, the slathering fresh butter, I’m sure had no small part of that. But, the bread is soft, chewy, with crispy bits where there’s a bubble in the dough as it bakes, it is not the dry, stuff we get that honestly tastes more like cardboard than bread. Sadly, now naan bread falls into one of those foods, that I most likely will usually be disappointed with, when I have it somewhere else…it has become the food equivalent in India that Crème Brulee is for me in France, disappointing most of the time when compared to what you get there. But, isn’t this exactly why we travel? To discover and experience a place, it’s feeling, air, culture, food, and people! India I found to be intense and extreme in every sense imaginable.
At the end of my journey, I had arrived at the Four Points by Sheraton Delhi Airport Hotel, and once again sat in the car, waiting for the valet to notice me, and approach, which never happens. It seems they are simply too shocked to see a single white guy driving a car himself in India, they don’t know what you are doing there. I took my bags out of the trunk, and checked in, handing them the key at the desk with instructions of who would be coming to pick up the car from Hyundai Motor, and they still seemed very perplexed.
The hotel was basic and nice enough, I’d not be there long, my flight was a midnight, but I hoped to catch a short nap and a meal before taking the complementary hotel shuttle to the airport, and for this purpose it was perfectly suited, and prepared me for the long journey ahead flying from Delhi, to Frankfurt in first class on Lufthansa, and then on to San Francisco and finally to Los Angeles, on what United calls business class, which I know will be a huge fall from the Lufthansa experience.
After dropping the car off, I had this feeling of “whew, am I glad that’s over!” India is a cacophony of noise and frenetic energy, with brief moments of harmony. In those moments and for the next couple of weeks, I was relieved to leave India behind. It’s not a common feeling with a place, but it happens, I had the same feeling with Egypt. But, with India, two-weeks later, I was looking at pictures with friends, and had this overwhelming desire to go back, which I know I will someday return to India. That is where the experience with India is so different from Egypt, which is a place I have no desire at all to return.