The bazaar and the even more bizarre

Hat anyone?
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We woke up feeling very pleased with ourselves and properly relaxed for the first time since leaving New Zealand, largely I think due to the lack of grime. It is true what people say, that a lot of India is very dirty. It is not just the streets, which in many places have mounds of rubbish, consisting most noticeably of plastic bags and bottle, that are so huge that people have begun to live on top of them, but it is the windows, the walls, the buses, the blankets, the menus, the tables, the chairs and pretty much everything else. And although at first you try to overlook the grime, it does begin to get rather depressing after a while. The Sundar Palace however is spotless.

The Pink City
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As we looked around our room in the daylight we became convinced that we had been put in the wrong place and, while I was happy to continue in ignorance and worry about it when/if we got found out, Jon needed to check. It turned out that we were in the right room and that all of this luxury was our for three nights for about $22 (about nine pounds) a night.

Feeling even more pleased with ourselves we made our way up to the roof terrace for breakfast which is covered in pots of different coloured Bourganvillia and other flowering plants; multicolored fairy lights; and has an amazing view of the whole of Jaipur (Na and Beth you would have loved it!).

After a yummy breakfast of paratha, chai and pancakes which we ate while tiny multi coloured birds hopped around us pecking up the crumbs (seriously!) we decided to do a walk around the old city recommended by the Lonely Planet.

If we thought that crossing the road in Agra was hard, it is nothing compared to Jaipur. On the main roads in Jaipur there is so much traffic that people actually have to drive in the same direction if they are on the same side of the road (now that's busy). We made the mistake of pausing at the edge of a road when confronted by a wall of traffic traveling at high speed, everyone of course beeping their horns continuously, and were immediately pounced on by a woman begging; a man selling dolls dressed in traditional clothing and a man who just wanted to see what we were doing and who we were.

After much, 'I'm sorry,' 'No I think your dolls are lovely but I don't want to buy them' and 'New Zealand...Jon and Elly...Agra...seven and a half weeks...' We gave the woman some rupees, waved goodbye to the other two and plunged into a minuscule gap in the traffic preparing at any moment to be squashed.

Amazingly, we made it to the other side and on we went, being greeted by at least half of the two million plus people who live in Jaipur along the way.

The old town in Jaipur is lovely. The walls of the old city are a pinky, terracotta colour and are castellated and have several huge gates by which you can enter into that part of town. Apparently Maharajah Ram Singh II had the city painted this colour to celebrate a visit to Jaipur by the Prince of Wales in 1876 and the city has been painted the same colour ever since. It was repainted recently to celebrate a visit by Bill Clinton so it was looking very smart when we saw it. The colour is meant to symbolise welcome and friendship and I think is a great symbol of the hospitality that most Indians show to visitors in their country. Indian people are so friendly and welcoming that traveling here begins to feel like an endless tour of someone's home, which of course it is.

Inside the pink city, the bizarre is truly bazaar. It is stuffed with thousands of stalls selling everything from saris to pickles, bike tyres to jewelery, rolls of copper wire, towers of the iridescent red powder Hindus use for their bindis, blankets, toilets(!) and nearly anything else you could ever possibly want.

The people in the bazaar, the stall keepers and the shoppers, were lovely. Everyone was smiling and saying 'hello,' 'Hello, yes you see my shop' or just a simple 'Namaste' and the women looked amazing, so colourful and elegant in their beautiful saris haggling and laughing over the price of some fabric to make yet another stunning sari. After a short time walking through the bazaar you start to feel like you are at some kind of carnival, there are even people on the sides of the road selling candyfloss and roasting nuts.

The Lonely planet had told us that the walk would take one and a half hours...five hours later in was getting dark when we decided that we should probably head back to our hotel to get some food and a shower in our shiny, spotless bathroom (did I mention it was clean?!) and drop our exhausted feet into bed.