An early start, with a 5:00 departure for a 6:00 train from Delhi to Jaipur.
Travelling through the streets in the early morning is a completely different experience. Without the masses of cars, people and bikes the rubbish is so visible. It’s everywhere. Strewn about 2-3 metres across the edge of every road, with the occasional big pile in between. Paper, food scraps, building materials for block after block. And worse, in between and amongst the rubbish lie the homeless – old, young, families. It’s poverty like we have never seen before.
We’ve started a list of things we take for granted – hot water, clean water, rubbish collection. But this morning I’m just grateful that we have a roof over our head.
We reach the craziness of Delhi station, and find our train. We’re travelling first class, but it’s far from what you might expect. Even our guide didn’t let his bag touch the floor, and the Western toilet… well… maybe it’s a good thing that the photos didn’t do it justice. At least the hole that went to the tracks had a slight curve, so it didn’t completely feel like you were crouching at 100km+ an hour!
Our hotel in Jaipur is reminiscent of ‘The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel’ with the colonials sitting in the garden out the front sipping tea. It fits the ‘British built, Indian maintained’ tag we heard yesterday 🙂
We’re pretty adventurous now, so headed straight out to the streets of Jaipur. It’s as chaotic as Delhi, but feels slightly less busy. It’s amazing how many people are out and about on a Monday afternoon. Surely someone has to go to work?
The ‘Bazar’ is a long wide street with shops either side. The shops seem to be grouped by type – spices, vegetables, flowers, pots and pans. In between there are plenty of clothing stores and soft furnishings. All are ‘hole in the wall’ style with little signage to distinguish one from the next. Nothing is priced.
We finally found an ATM (can you tell how much of an issue this has become???) that had money. Someone pushed me to the front of the queue, and on the advice of our guide yesterday, persevered through 9 transactions to get 5 x $40 out. Even though I could hear rumblings in the queue behind me, ther was no way I was going to leave without the maximum amount available per day. In the paper this morning I read that 100 Indians have died waiting for hours in bank queues this month – I was not about to be the first foreigner!
Tonight we’ve been out to have the authentic Bollywood experience at ‘Raj Minder’, one of the biggest movie theatres in the country, with 1200 seats. It’s old school… ornate foyer, curtains across the screen, the national anthem, and intermission. We saw ‘Befikre’ – a love story set in Paris about being wild and free. True to form, it had the obligatory Bollywood fight scenes and dancing, and was pretty funny. The majority was in Indian with the odd English word thrown in. We understood most of it, but judging by the laughter from the Indians in the audience, some of it was lost on us!
Love theBunch x
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