Jaipur

This is a continuation of my diary from my RTW trip from October 2003.

5 hours on the train gave me enough time to catch my breath. On arrival in Jaipur I got a taxi and transferred to our hotel in the Old City.

Jaipur is called the Pink city, as all the buildings in the old city are thus painted. The highlights of the place are the Hawa Mahal (Palace of the Winds), Jandar Mandar (India’s biggest medieval astronomical observatory) and the Palace of the Raj of Jaipur. These were interesting to look around and were all as ornate and dusty as you would expect.

Besides this, Jaipur is a lively place, made livelier as the locals prepare for Diwali on Saturday. Flashing lights are being hung from every building; bunches of tinsel are hanging off every tuk-tuk and silvery streamers are being strung across the streets. There was also much more in the way of wildlife in the streets of the old town than I had seen in Delhi.

While I was in Jaipur I saw a report on CNN about the cow overpopulation problem in Delhi. The city wants to be taken seriously on the world stage as a world city like London, New York or Sydney. They are also desperate to stage the Olympics, and are especially unhappy that the Chinese have beaten them to it, having won the right to the 2008 games. They have since been awarded the 2010 Commonwealth Games and hope to use this to bid for the Olympics in 2020.

The municipal leaders of Delhi have decided that the cows wandering around means that people don’t take Delhi seriously and have been rounding them up and ‘deporting’ them.

There are now apparently some 20,000 cows on the outskirts of Delhi that no-one knows what to do with. The effect of this policy though is that Delhi, while having some cows wandering around, doesn’t have the volume of wildlife you get in the other cities.

As I’d mostly spent our time in Delhi in the first week, the quantity of animals in Jaipur came as quite a surprise! Cows, Pigs, Horses, Donkeys, Goats, Dogs, Dogs and more Dogs, as well as lots of working Elephants, of which there are also few in Delhi.

PS: This is a photo of me standing on the device to help you observe Gemini... my own star sign.