Jaipur onwards

Its been a few days since our last update, and whats more we've lost the travel adaptor so slowly but surely all our electronics are failing. We are still going strong, and have just arrived in the mountains of Shimla in the north of India. But we've got a few days to track back on first...

From Agra we caught the train of death to Jaipur, but things definitely picked up since we got there. We headed to the nicest cheap place in the guide book, which usually means they have no rooms when we get there... but as luck would have it they had a lovely room which we managed to haggle down a bit too (its all about the 50p haggling...)



Compared to all the other rooms we've stayed in this was like the Ritz, all lovely details and it was spotlessly clean for a change.

Jaipur was a very different city to Agra - where as Agra seemed very poor, Jaipur was very afluent in comparison. The old town, inside the famous pink walls, was fairly typical, but in the south of the city there were western style shopping centres and bars. But you are never very far away from the animals on the roads, no matter where you end up in India...



As we mentioned in the last update, Jaipur is something of a legend for shopping. The full range of Indian fabrics, jewellery and arts and crafts are on offer from countless shops in the bazaars in the old town. Alex was obviously in her element, and we spent a good few hours each day browsing and haggling.



One of the highlights for us was going to see a bollywood film in the incredible art deco cinema - the film was absolutely crazy, trying to put it in one genre would be impossible. It started as a teen high school drama, then came some epic musical bits, then it went a bit karate kid, and then suddenly the leading chap found out he could see the future and it went a bit Nicholas Cage action thriller... the dialogue has chunks of english dotted through it so we could pretty much make sense of it. Really good fun though, they should make more films like that for western audiences we reckon =)

So that led us up to the 24th, Alex's birthday. We started sightseeing in the mountains behind the city - its called the Monkey temple because of the army of monkeys have have settled in the temples. The temple itself was a bit run down, but the temple at the top had an amazing view over the city. We got tourist trapped in the temple, we were too sweaty and horrible to dodge them, hence the crazy monkey poo "good luck" dots on our heads!



We spent the afternoon shopping for jewellery, and then headed out for some cocktails in the evening. You can just about see the lovely bracelet we found for Alex's birthday present in this picture :



We had a lovely few days in Jaipur, and we were a little sad to leave. We'd made our lives a little hard by arranging two days of travelling - the first was back to Delhi on the train (7 hours), grabbing a few hours sleep before hitting a morning train to Kalka (another 6 hours) and then a crazy "toy" train up the mountains into Shimla (another 6 hours). Quite the mission, but we survived it. The toy train was a proper narrow gauge railway through the mountains, it was only about 30 km but it really did wind around forever.



We were really knackered when we arrived, and stupidly we thought 300 rupees was too much of a rip off to get a cab to the hotel (normally you pay around 50 rupees for a reasonble length journey). The trip to the hotel turned out to involve queuing up for ages to get lift up the mountain, and it almost killed me walking up the final bit of hills to the hotel with the packs on. Really daft turning our nose up at the 4 quid or whatever it would have been in the cab... oh well.

We've arrived in Shimla at peak season, so the place is buzzing. Its peak season as people leave Delhi and surrounding area to avoid the heat before the monsoon, so its almost bearable up here. Our hotel is a real shocker compared to the last place, and to add to our worries there is a drought as the monsoon is so late this year. This means no running water up here... so its water out of buckets all the way. Joy!

The view over the balcony is amazing, wish we had a good photo though, but as we've left the power adaptor in Agra (gah!) we haven't got any recent ones. The city is perched up in the mountains, sprawling over a huge area. Anyway hopefully we'll have some pictures next time. There is a big old queue for the one computer here, and we are getting rude looks, time to sign off =)