Jaipur 30th March 2006

We both woke fairly early on Friday morning and were walking into town by 09:30. Jaipur is known as the Pink City as all the buildings in the old town have been painted pink. It’s meant to be “amazing”, but I found it to be as run down as every other Indian city I’ve been in, the only difference I found was that all the buildings were painted a reddy pink.

We did walk through a spice-yard, and there were hundreds of bags of spices piled up and each section smelt really strongly of the spice they were storing. The chilli really caught in your throat and the garlic section was really aromatic. We got hassled by the usual cycle and auto-rickshaw drivers, but we ended up ignoring most of them. We decided to get away from the main drag and headed towards the hill on the edge of town. We ended up walking down narrower and narrower streets and the surface was getting worse all the time. The locals were nice to us all the kids and a couple of adults shouting hello to us. We also came across this guy who asked us why all foreigners didn’t talk to Indian people. I read about this in Lonely Planet and it’s a scam designed to rid you of your money and / or belongings. Basically, you disagree with him and he invites you for a cup of tea, drugs you and robs you. He said the exact speil that was in the book. We told him that he was more than welcome to speak to us as long as he kept walking. He tried to get us to stop, but we kept up our fairly fast pace and he gave up.

The road (unsealed) got worse and worse and eventually it was bisected by an open sewer, we had about half a dozen kids tagging behind us at this stage, and I was glad that I had my mate for company. We eventually managed to find our way out of the maze and tried to find a restaurant to have some breakfast in. There was some place that should have been near by, according to the map in the Lonely Planet, and by some small miracle we found it. We were fairly boring and ordered a veg burger and chips each, it was ok.

My hand has flared up again, so I went to a chemist and got some iodine to put on it, I also bought some cotton wool and a bandage so that I can keep the infection covered, the chemist also gave me two types of tablets to take; I really hope that it doesn’t flare up again.