pink elephants on parade

I'm sure it's surprising to absolutely no one that the only people riding elephants up to Amber Fort were white tourists. I felt pretty guilty about doing it (the elephants are wildly dehydrated and suffer generally, according to my Lonely Planet guidebook and also our own eyes), but I did not feel quite guilty enough not to go for a ride when Lauren and Jess were both doing it.

Riding in the basket on the elephant's back was not particularly comfortable, and it's hard to look like much more of a doofus than I did when the mahout put his turban on my head.







We'd hired an auto-rickshaw for the trip to and from Amber Fort, the driver of which was a wizened old man who told us we were like his daughters. "You should watch out for the bad boys who will try to sell you things," he told us as we approached Amber Fort. "I protect you, because you are like my daughters."

As we piled back into the auto-rickshaw after visiting Amber Fort, he presented each of us with a set of stick-on bindis. "A present for you, because you are like my daughters," he said.

And then, because we must have been truly like his daughters, he took us to what we agreed was the biggest tourist trap in Jaipur: a "traditional handiwork emporium" with a row of auto-rickshaws parked out front and a bunch of confused-looking white tourists sitting on couches being shown piece after piece of "authentic traditional handiwork." We decided that the fact that we made it out of there rapidly and without buying a thing meant that we had become India shopping experts.

springtime in the pink city

The third and final city we visited in India was Jaipur. I hadn't, initially, been sure why Jaipur would be the third point of the Golden Triangle (the most popular route for tourists, particularly ones, like us, who are only in India for a week). Delhi, sure -- it's the capital. Agra, obviously -- it's got the Taj Mahal. What was Jaipur's claim to fame?

A beautiful pink-walled old city; a good dozen markets full of endearingly pushy salesmen hawking everything from saris to home repair supplies to milk; a cotton candy-puff of a movie theater called Raj Mandir where we watched Atithi Tum Kab Jaoge? and I sat in fascination at the way English gets mixed into the Hindi (and decided that I need to visit Mumbai); and, on the edge of the city, the Amber Fort, which was such an experience that it merits its own post.

Also, Jaipur was the home of one of the more wonderful hotels I've ever stayed in: the Hotel Sunder Palace. "You know it's gonna be palatial if it's got 'palace' in the name," we joked. But you know what? Hotel Sunder Palace pretty much was.

city of love

Though cute, I thought Agra was a pretty boring city, with one big exception: It's got the Taj freaking Mahal.





The Taj is the thing to see in Agra (and, you know, in the world in general), so I suppose I can forgive the city for not seeming to have a ton else to offer. The tomb of I'timād-ud-Daulah (a.k.a. the Baby Taj) was cool-looking, and was an excellent place to take a nap, and of course we were delighted by the view of the Taj from the rooftop restaurant at Hotel Shanti Lodge, but we had plenty of time to visit both of those things and the Taj itself and walk into the Hotel Oberoi for a drink* in our sweat-stained salwar kameez and still had time left over for a nice long nap. At the end of the day we all looked at each other and said we were glad we'd been to Agra, but dude, if we'd been there more than one day, what would we have even done with ourselves?








* Strolling into hotels where we were not staying and that were far outside of our price range was a bit of a theme of this trip. We did this not just in Agra, but in Dhaka and Delhi, too. It was half-awesome (look at what you can get away with if you look like you know what you're doing!) and half-disconcerting (how much of the "getting away with it" was because we were all white? probably a whole lot.).

i explain you the delhi.

I wasn't necessarily expecting to like Delhi. Diana had warned me that it was a government town, the most smoothly run (and in that sense most boring) place I could possibly go in India. And you know, I can see that. The British influence is still strong in Delhi, but it's not just that -- Delhi's making a huge push to become a major international city. Its metro, which opened in 2002, is gorgeous, its traffic patterns more or less make sense, and we visited a mall in South Delhi that was one of the most surreal experiences of the whole trip -- had I not known for a fact that we were still in India, I would have sworn I'd been dropped into Southern California.

Having said all this, I really liked Delhi.






We wandered through markets and the Red Fort and a mosque in Old Delhi; ate delicious mutton cooked on a grill on the street; visited Gandhi Smriti (the museum in the house where Gandhi was assassinated) and Rajghat (the park where Gandhi was cremated); shopped till we dropped in Karol Bagh and got pedicures from hot men at a day spa in Greater Kailash 1. Delhi seemed full of possibility, ready for anything. I like that in a city.