I’m going to claim that the weekly blog post schedule is slipping because our itinerary has become more active over the last week or so. An increase in activity wouldn’t be difficult – during our time in Rishikesh the most taxing daily activity could be the discussion (argument) around where to eat dinner. We’ve discovered that where we have less than, say, four days in one place we feel the pressure to switch into aggressive sightseeing mode versus something more sedate. You may think sedate = lazy, and you’d be correct, though we do need to set aside time for work and future trip planning admin.
The overnight bus to Jaipur (17th/18th October) was a success (credit to K). Easy to book online, the company text you a link to track where the bus is (relieved fears it wasn’t going to turn up when half an hour late), and certainly the most comfortable overnight travelling I’ve done, as you get a bed. See picture below – either side of the corridor are two rows of pods, double beds to the left and singles to the right, with a screen for privacy.
Friday in Jaipur was an example of ‘aggressive’ sightseeing (for us) – after arriving at 7am and finding our guest house we walked to a cafe opposite Hawa Mahal (Palace of Winds) for breakfast. Views were great, food was not. We then took an auto-rickshaw via Uber to the Amer Fort and wandered around the surrounding grounds, including another fort, Jaigarh, that sits above it.
The best way to see the fort is from the hillside opposite, climbing up stairs built into a series of fortifications topped with towers along the ridge of the hill. We had one of the towers to ourselves, and spent some time taking pictures of the fort in the sunset (and in doing so preventing an influencer-looking couple from doing the same – they raced up as soon as we left).
Next was the Albert Hall Museum back in town, which is only 100 INR if you go after 7pm. This wasn’t the most thrilling part of the day, although they do have some interesting musical instruments on display. On the way we stopped at McDonalds (I know…) – I at least got a paneer burger. Finally we walked home past Hawa Mahal again.
The next day we took a trip to a couple of temples on the hillside at the eastern edge of the city – Sun Temple and Hanuman Ji or Monkey Temple. Lots of well fed monkeys at both, it’s good karma to feed them apparently.
On Sunday 20th we took an early morning bus to Delhi. We often use the Wikitravel website for travel tips – the entry for Delhi has a number of warnings about various scams, one of which is for your taxi driver to falsely claim your hotel has recently closed and encourage you to book into another. Our experience was fine though – an uneventful Uber to our hotel in Paharganj close to New Delhi Train station. We definitely lose traveler (and probably moral) cred for taking Ubers, but it’s great not to have to barter.
It was dark by the time we’d checked in and eaten, but we managed to take the metro to see the Red Fort before bed. The walls cover almost 2.5 km, very impressive walking around close up.
The Delhi metro proved a cheap and convenient way to get around the city – single trips were between 10 – 30 INR. Unfortunately not the best experience for women – K got sick of being stared at and each train has a women-only carriage to combat gropers (K – “not the right measure to address the problem”).
Humayun’s Tomb is another impressive complex of buildings and gardens. There were lots of school kids visiting too, so we got a lot of ‘hello’s!’, a few selfie requests, and a couple of handshakes. Certainly worth visiting, if only for a walk around the gardens.
Per the scams section of the Wikitravel page, plus various conversations with people who’d been before, we’d expected Delhi to be quite a slog, but we didn’t find it to be too much of a challenge. I think our period of acclimatisation to India in (relatively calm) Rishikesh was a real help here and, in fairness, we only spent 3 full days in Delhi. To be specific, by acclimatisation I mean getting used to 1. incessant beeping from traffic 2. rubbish everywhere 3. harassment from people keen for you to buy stuff. We actually found Jaipur to be worse than Delhi on these terms – we had an open sewer complete with foraging pigs next to where we were staying.
On Thursday (24th) morning we got up far too early for our flight to Kathmandu and arrived at the airport 3 hrs 45 mins before the flight departed. We’re splitting our 12 days in Nepal between Kathmandu and Pokhara. Nepal fact – time here is, weirdly, GMT+5:45 (only discovered this today). More on Nepal next time!!
Carol and David On Tour 