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Hey all I'm in Jaipur which is an enormous city painted mostly pink, very strange - something to do with King George visiting 100 years ago. It's very busy and noisy - like every Indian city I think.
In Udaipur I found Dave and Ray - the Canadian's I met on day 2. Was a very "it's a small world" moment and they were most pleased to see I'd been eating and was no longer ill :). We went to a traditional Rajastani dance performance together in the evening which we thought would be horribly naff but was actually quite good. The women danced with fire on their heads and hit themselves with metal rings in a very painful dance. At the end one woman kept dancing with pots on her head - she got ten high and then danced on broken glass. Somehow she enjoyed it. We also went to the enormous City Palace where some of the rooms were just full of delicate painting and mirrors on every space of the wall - this looked amaing.
Then we defyed the trucks driving on the wrong side of the road, the suicidal goats and the jeeps that seem intent to play chicken and made it to Pushkar. I loved Pushkar, though not in the beginning - we arrived in the middle of an intense thunderstorm and had several power cuts. When the storm stopped we went to explore town. Pushkar is a very special place for Hindu's; there's a holy lake in the middle which pilgrims bathe themselves in. The whole town is purely vegetarian and has a huge hippy community. The shops all sell ethical clothes and everywhere sells bhang lassi's - ground cannabis in a nutty milkshake curd type thing. I had a normal lassi in Delhi and didn't like it and I heard the lassi's here are really strong so didn't try one. Hayley and Cassie did and got (from what Cassie said) quite stoned. We explored the town and was caught out by another thunderstorm. We took shelter in a camel leather shop, the power went off, I p*****d the owner right off by dropping crisps everwhere in the dark, and the town flooded. We took a retro taxi from the 50's back to the hotel, which also nearly flooded.
The power came on and we watched Indian tv - which was as weird as the rest of the country; their soaps just consist of silent zooms into characters faces. In the morning me and Kim climbed an enormous hill to a temple above the town. I keep mixing up the Hindu God's because apart from Ganesh they all look very alike. So it was that I embarassed myself again my mixing up Brahma, Shiva, Parvati, Durga and all the others and feeling very ignorant. It was very hot and we kept being followed by scarily large monkeys but the views from the top were great.
I started off watching the hippy's slightly mockingly but on the second day I'd bought hippy clothes (at 80p for some trousers you can't say no) and I'm ashamed to say began to be won over by the hippy lifestyle. It was probably a good idea we left Pushkar as I'd of been caught by the peace, love and harmony crew otherwise.
So to Jaipur where the hotel is a dive (they've been really inconsistent all the time - from palaces to dirty hovels). We went to a Hindu big temple where all the Indian's wanted their photo taken with us and a really dusty museum which was full of pidgeons. In the evening we went to the best place to see a Bollywood movie in India - the Raj Mandir cinema. This place really put the Savoy to shame, it looked like wedding cake and was apparently one of the most famous cinemas in Asia. The movie was very romantic, I didn't understand a word of it but it was fairly easy to follow, boy meets girl, cue lots of dancing. Then a rainstorm, more dancing, then oh no a fire the wedding must be ruined, but no more dancing and marraige happens.
Next day we went to another couple of palaces- which were incredible in their own right but I've seen enoough now, they're a lot to take in as each royal family has such unusaul histories - today's Maharaja had 102 wives and concubines, no children and had a 1.1m waist! We had an elephant ride when I suddenly realised that up close elephants are really scary. I had to climb up onto it which was also really scary as it moved and I thought I was going to fall off! It's even scarier riding through packed city streets on the back of one and I was a little dissapointed not to be riding up to the fort. I was also worried that the elephant was not very well looked after.
After that I was a little pissed off and then Anil wanted to go to a gem shop. Anil can be very sneaky; trying to get us to go to places that give him commission if we buy something (everything is there much more expensive to cover it) so we've had to be firm with him and we made him grouchy. The Amber fort was perched high above Jaipur and was full of monkeys who were very entertaining and clumsy. A guy in uniform came up to us and started telling us about the World's biggest cannon which we were watching and I was wary he was going to rip us off as a fake guide (this has happenned already) but he was brilliant. He led us through all the secret passages and knew everything. He was so happy to talk it made a real difference (some of the guides have been really crap) so we gave him a tip and he was overjoyed. Then we watched the sunset from the ramparts.
Today is the last day of my tour with Tammy and Kim as we all go of to other parts of the country - Tammy to Orissa and Kim to Pune. It feels like we've been travelling together for ages and we'll hopefully all meet up in a month or so. Tomorrow I'm going with Anil to Agra to see the Taj Mahal! Then I'm going on a train to Orchha village where I plan to rest for a bit because I've been doing so much over the past 2 weeks. Photo wise I think I will burn a cd and send it back home for you to upload so I'll do that in a week or so. Well that was another long one!
Namaste!
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