Jaipur, Udaipur, Jodhpur, Jaisalmer: the pink city, the white city, the blue city, the gold city. Jaipur offered detailed Islamic architecture; Udaipur, a pristine lakeside palace worthy of the backdrop to a James Bond film; Jodhpur, Rajasthan province’s premier citadel; and Jaisalmer, the country’s only “living” fort.
The overnight train from New Delhi dropped us southwest in Jaipur at 5 a.m. on October 14, where we began our travel through India’s most renown—and touristed—province of Rajasthan. We walked from the train station through gritty streets and got lost. A woman frantically grabbed Claire’s arm and pulled her down a back alley. I followed. The woman pushed us out a rear gate and across from a pleasant guesthouse, where we stayed.
The pink-painted city palace was interesting, but a bit mundane, with the highlight being the two silver urns listed in the Guinness Book of Records as the largest crafted silver objects in the world, each more than 1.5 meters high with a capacity of 8,182 liters. Nearby was the Hawa Mahal, possibly the narrowest building I’ve seen since The Flatiron in Manhattan:
Also nearby the palace was a former raj’s astronomy park, full of anachronistic star-measuring devices:
Jaipur makes up the third point of the so-called “Golden Triangle” along with Agra and New Delhi, or the three main sights of India, all relatively close to each other in northwest India. Again, I was disappointed with the offerings. Jaipur was crowded with hawkers and noisy with rickshaw drivers. It’s like hearing a fire alarm constantly beeping beside your head. My theory is that Indian children hear the beeps from childbirth and go deaf to the sound, so it doesn’t bother the locals.
It was a relief to get away from the beeps and be in Udaipur, in south-central Rajasthan. The 1983 James Bond film “Ocotopussy” was set here among the white-washed colonial buildings. Like Bond, we rode in a rickshaw through Udaipur’s narrow streets (though not while dodging bullets). Like Bond, we visited the lakefront City Palace (though we didn’t escape through a window). And like Bond, we rode out to the floating palace (though not in an alligator costume):
Just when I was enjoying the peace, India’s biggest festival began. All the locals were in good spirits for Diwali, with shopkeepers offering stiff bargains because they wanted last-minute cash to spend during the festival.
All over the city, kids and adults were lighting firecrackers, which didn’t really light up as much as bang. Some little brats especially enjoyed sabotaging the white foreigners, tossing the bangers in our direction or lighting them up as we passed. It was a war zone.
Then I joined. A group of boys insisted that I light a firecracker. I did, it made a loud bang, we all laughed, and they insisted I light another. I did. And I did it again. And then the little snots snuck a short-fused firecracker into my hand, and I’d barely lit the thing when it blew up in my hand.
From pink city to white city to blue city, we arrived by bus to Jodhpur. Supposedly to keep out the heat and scare away the bugs, many of the houses here are painted pale blue:
Meherangarh Fort towers over Jodhpur from a high rock outcropping. Old cannons still point outward from the tall and curvaceous sandstone walls. Inside the fort, along with armory and old maharaja costumes, were the handprints of more than 32 widows who voluntarily jumped into their dead husband’s funeral pyre—an act known as sati, now outlawed but still performed.
Further west of Jodhpur sits the “golden city” of Jaisalmer, at the edge of the Thar Desert. The city wasn’t so much golden-colored as sandy brown. We rented a cheap hotel room inside the city fort—the only inhabited fort in all of India, supposedly. Our window looked out from the fort’s defense wall to the desert below.
