Our trip started with a large breakfast at our hotel. We stayed at the Palace Hotel in Jaipur India. We took our busses (BTW lots of room to spread out on these busses). We went to the Pink City and entered the very large Hawa Mahal Palace of Winds. We visited a very old Royal Observatory (Jantar Mantar) which was built in 1728 and is still accurate to the minute! This place is known for its artifacts and innovations and instrumentation that observed the stars and where some of the first sun based clocks were invented. We drove through this very primitive and very sophisticated land of India. You can see people getting a shave and a haircut, a root canal by a dentist!, buying produce, shopping open markets and shops and even some cows wandering. The traffic is very heavy through the city and the circles are just a mad house, everyone pushing and driving any way possible to get through the traffic. Driving out of this city is similar to driving through outlining cities of Mexico or other third world countries. Women are sitting on beds with children waiving to our bus as we go by. The density of people here is amazing. There goes a Sketchers store… The main streets look some what modern but looking back on side streets it looks so primitive. Lots of industry on the outskirts of the city. We are on our way to Ranthambore.
The heat is intense and the temperature is over 100. Even in the countryside the air is hazy . Right now everything seems very dusty, as well. We’ll see when we get to Ranthambore to find tigers if things are different.
As we are driving along the highway (1 lane each way) we have to slow down every so often for a stray ox or cow walking in the road. There is every kind of vehicles on the road that you can imagine. Trucks, vans, cars, motorcycles, tractors, three wheel vehicles and walkers. At the rest stop I walked out to the road and watched several busses with windows open full of people. It’s only 100° who wouldn’t want to be in a bus with no A/C. Reminded me of some of the scenes in Romancing the Stone. On the map below we are the blue dot.
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