The Pink City

Jon took this and if you had seen the hell-hole toilets at Hotel El' Scummie one and two you would understand why...
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We caught our train for Jaipur at Agra Fort station which is an entirely different experience from Agra Cant. Agra Fort is dirty and smelly and crowed. There were hundreds of people everywhere: people wearing big scarves wrapped around their faces; people carrying multiple suitcases on their heads; people hoiking and gobbing; people leading goats along the platform and all the time the smell and the noise and the heat was overwhelming.

Amongst the activity we managed to find our platform with the help of a very official man wearing a blue suit with gold buttons who reinforced his authority (less we doubted it) by scribbling in Hindi with chalk on the sides of all of the carriages we passed.

The Sundar Palace
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Once we found the right platform our train arrived quickly and we boarded with high hopes for the journey after our plush experience of being pampered and fed on the way from Delhi. However the train to Jaipur was not a Shatabdhi Express but a sleeper so we spent the journey squashed into a top bunk with sticky plastic seats, trying to ignore the screaming children on the next bunk.

Arriving in Jaipur was...interesting. We got there at around 10pm to the amazement of everyone in the city (apparently that train is always at least an hour late). Jon had booked a hotel, on the recommendation of the owner of Hotel El' scummie number 2,  and had been told that they would send someone to pick us up. He was also given strict instructions not to go with anyone unless they were stood at the auto rickshaw stand even if they had our name and the name of the hotel.

As we left the station we spotted out a man who held a card with our name and the hotel name but he was not standing by the auto rickshaw stand...the next half an hour was ridiculous. The rickshaw driver, whose name we later learned was Bablu, followed us around with a mob of mates enthusiastically trying to convince us, in English and Hindi, that he was the person sent from the hotel. Meanwhile me and Jon were torn between wanting to believe him and wanting to heed the warning of the hotel owner. In the end we decided to go with Bablu and it turned out that he was the right person but our paranoid hotelier had forgotten to tell him where to stand...ahh India!

Once we had finally arrived at our hotel and filled out the enormous visitors book, we were shown to our room. Desperately trying not to get our hopes up and all the time mentally preparing ourselves for hotel El' Scummie numero tres we were overwhelmed when the door opened.  I actually blurted out 'it's beautiful!' (!) to which the guy working at the hotel uttered a slightly confused but proud, 'Thank you'. And it really was. It was also very clean. Clean floor, clean walls, clean sheets (no dodgy stains) clean bathroom even...clean toilet and...toilet paper! We were in heaven  and after a lot of jumping around and laughing we went off to sleep in our oh-so-clean bed :)