Mc Maharaja

Jaipur is the capital of Rajasthan, and quite a big city with nearly 2.5 million people. The old city is still surrounded by a huge sandstone wall, reminiscent of some medieval town. Our first stop this morning was the City Palace, within the walls of the old city (also called the Pink City, as the sandstone is a pinkish terracotta colour). On our way, we passed many camel-driven carts bearing produce, construction rubble, and all sorts of things. We also passed 2 well decorated elephants on the street which seemed out of place in this state known for it's love of camels.

The Palace is surrounded by another smaller wall, and building began in the 1600s continuing on and updating well into the 1900s. We first went to the Maharaja Sawai Mansingh II museum, which houses a collection of clothing worn by various maharajas and maharanis. Most of it was pretty ugly, but it was cool to see the different costumes, like the polo and billiards outfits. Next we went to what used to be the Maharani's apartments, but now houses a museum of old weaponry...we're not quite sure on the connection. There was a large display of swords, daggers, knives, and guns. Some of the daggers even had guns built into them. The staff here must have been bored one day and seeing the excess of daggers lying around arranged them into a curious welcome sign that hung over the door to the museum. The guns were of varing sizes from small garter pistols to huge 10 foot rifles. There was even a large gun mounted onto an elephant 'saddle'.
Back outside we passed our favourite, the Diwan-i-Am (Hall of Private Audiences) where the 2 largest silver vessels in the world are. One of the Maharajas had these huge 1.6 metre tall urns made so he could bring water from the Ganges when he visited England, as he didn't trust the water there. We saw some ancient artwork in one of the buildings as well. Some areas of the City Palace are closed off, as the son of the last maharaja and his family still live here.

From here we walked to the Jantar Mantar, an observatory built by Maharaja Jai Singh in 1728. He was obsessed with astronomy and built five of these observatories around India. We saw one of them in Varanasi, but it is not maintained like this one. Jai Singh had all of the 'modern' tools for astronomy, brought back from Europe by the people he'd send there to learn all of the latest astronomical technology. But he didn't think they were accurate enough, so he built these huge, concrete instruments outside in a park (now the observatory). All of the instruments for reading stars, telling the time with the sun, checking planet alignments and heaps of other astrology stuff are fit for a giant. They have all been tested as well, and those not exactly accurate have been remedied, so it is still a working observatory. Despite the heat of the day (another 40C-ish day), we had fun wandering around all of the strange looking structures.

We then wandered along the shop-lined streets to Hawa Mahal, a 5-storey building originally built for the royal ladies to watch the happenings on the street below. It did have some good views, but was a pretty boring place. Very hot and tired by this time, we headed back towards our hotel for a late lunch and a rest. On the way, we decided to give our tummies a treat and had McDonald's for lunch...we'd never thought we'd ever see McDonald's as a treat, but after 3 weeks in India, it was. Nigel had the Chicken Maharaja Mac and Kel had a Chicken Tikka burger. We relaxed for the remainder of the afternoon, had a few cold beers at our hotel (which one of the guys had to smuggle from a downstairs room, hiding them in a disguised bag) and a light dinner before heading to bed.