Jaipur

April 18, Thursday,

This morning we had a tour of Jaipur, which has come to be called the Pink City because the walls and many buildings were painted a sort of terra cotta color prior to an 1876 visit from the then Prince of Wales. We made one stop to see two special places. The first was called the Glass Palace, and was built by one of the maharajas who ruled Rajasthan. It was large and very nice to see, with beautiful glass mosaic work decorating some of the buildings, and the rest painted in Jaipur pink with fanciful white trim. 

Glass Palace courtyard

Glass Palace

Beautiful decoration!

More!

Defense

More defensive weapons

So beautiful

An example of glass mosaic work

Everything is exquisitely decorated!

The elephant gate

I love this little marble elephant

There were several men dressed as guards there, shooing birds off the chandeliers and posing for pictures. They wore long white tunic tops, long white loose pants, and red turbans with a long tail down the back. And big handlebar mustaches. Very picturesque.

 In addition to his palace, the rajah was interested in science and astrology, so on adjacent land he built a large conservatory which included many large devices for telling time by the sun, determining the date, and establishing the appropriate astrological sign for any moment of birth. It was all very complex, very accurate, and very much a scientific and engineering feat.

The astrological section

Telling time

What is your sign?

Virgo!

Lots of school children were there with us. Jaipur is one of the three most popular tourist destinations in India. Everyone was there!

school kids

musicians

Jainists

I love the clothes!

And this wonderful wall out in the town of Jaipur

Back on the bus late in the morning and then we were off to the airport for our charter flights to Mumbai. Scheduled to leave at 12:30, we actually left over an hour late. There were several hundred of us stuck there with no information, little or no ability to understand the few announcements that were made, no water and no food.  We were all very patient and well behaved until the three planes finally arrived and started boarding through the two same gates.  No one knew which flight was boarding first, so we worried about missing our own flight and consequently all crowded the gate area. A few passengers were Regent guides who apparently had not been paid to do their usual superior work during this transfer. In the end, all was well, but really, there was no excuse for Regent not having someone there to translate, organize, and shepherd us through. Not to mention providing us with water.  We were finally fed "aloft" but pretty terrible food and a small sweet drink instead of water. That was the first time anything on this trip has been less than excellent, however. FINALLY we arrived at the ship very much later than expected. The ship sailed soon thereafter, and we were all properly wined and dined as quickly as possible, leaving us feeling much happier long before bedtime.

We had been upgraded from an H stateroom (cheapest) to an E.  I don't know what the difference is, but our cabin is large and lovely with a balcony, a beautiful bath,and a walk in closet. I think I'm going to be thoroughly spoiled.

Regent Seven Seas Voyager

Our home away from home for the next couple of weeks

Sailing away from Mumbai

Agra to Jaipur

April 17, Wednesday   This morning I found a shop in the hotel arcade that had SD cards for sale. Seventy dollars US for a four gig card!  But with John's approval, I bought it and it works. Whew! We later realized we should have walked out, which would have caused the seller to drop the price.  We aren’t used to bargaining, were still jet-lagged, had all of five minutes to make our purchase, and in general were stupid about this.  Live and learn, but it left a bad taste in our mouths. We really never shop when we travel, and this is a big reason why.

We opted not to rise at 4 am to go back to see the Taj Mahal at dawn.  At that point, I didn't even know if my camera was working, so sleeping in seemed a better choice. Apparently we should have made the effort, however. Those who did said it was lovely, uncrowded, cooler, and with beautiful light. Oh well.

We visited the Agra Fort later this morning, I took lots of pictures, and have already downloaded them to my iPad.  As one of our fellow travelers, a woman with much camera expertise said, redundancy is good. She also assured me that if I take my damaged card to a good camera shop when I get home, they may be able to retrieve my pictures. She also said there are places on the Internet that can do the same. Good news. I really hate thinking I had lost the few pictures I had taken of the Taj Mahal. 

I have learned something new about my camera. When I was charging it this morning I removed the SD card and just plugged in the camera. It gave me a message that the photo it thought I was about to take would be stored in its built in memory. I had completely forgotten about that option. I don't think the memory is very large, but it is certainly good to have if this happens again!

Agra Fort

Agra Fort was interesting. Originally built as a brick fort that was later destroyed in war, it was rebuilt as a larger, studier fort, and later added to as an impregnable but more beautiful summer palace in the same era as the Taj Mahal.  Shah Jahan, the Muslim era ruler who built the Taj as a monument to his beloved second wife, was later imprisoned by his own son in this palace/fort, which he had embellished with several white marble buildings similar to the Taj Mahal’s style. His son killed his brothers and captured his father in order to seize the throne. The father told him he didn't mind being imprisoned as long as he could see the Taj.  He was kept in great style in a tower at the palace from which he did indeed have a view of his wife's and later his own final resting place. His son had 300 concubines (one a night for a year with Fridays and holidays off?) who all occupied this palace, hence it's very large size. It was called a fort by the English during their occupation of India, and they garrisoned their soldiers there. Today, it is an Indian army garrison.  For that reason, only a very small portion is open to the public, but that small area is still quite large with many rooms, gardens, and open areas.

Everything is decorated here!

We saw monkeys both here and at the Taj.

One of Shah Jahan's white marble additions

Inside what became a beautiful prison tower.  The inlays are made in the pietra dura style using inlays of carefully cut polished marble and semi-precious and even precious stones.

This window alcove has been restored to show some of the gold that adorned the entire room in Jahan's day.  The proportions and design of the buildings and rooms appeal to us today, but we can only imagine how they must have looked then, with gold, precious stones, tapestries, and other treasures everywhere.

This is the view of the Taj Mahal that Shah Jahan would have had from his prison room

He wouldn't have been able to zoom in this well, but then he knew the building intimately

After lunch we will be back on the bus for our four hour drive to Jaipur. Meanwhile, we are enjoying our air conditioned hotel room.   

The lobby of our hotel in Agra.  The filigree in the lower half is silver and is behind the reception desk

The courtyard and pools of the hotel

This is the street just outside our hotel

The ride to Jaipur was long but it was also a window into the real India. Neither of us can even begin to imagine driving here. The near misses with vehicles that are terrifyingly close are harrowing and the constant use of the horn is crazy-making. Luckily, we were on a bus with a competent Indian driver. Better him than any of us! 

Along the way we saw more wheat harvesting, dung patty drying, carts pulled by camels, taxis so loaded with people that some were hanging from the sides and others were on the roof, and dirt everywhere. It is surprising that the people seem to be quite clean because their living conditions are incomprehensibly disgusting to us. Yet their clothes are almost never soiled, and in fact, the women's saris are beautiful, even in the most impoverished areas. 

Camel parking

Yes, cows really do freely roam the streets of India

Sometimes, they are even all dressed up for something special!

When just one camel won't do...

Yes, those are dung patties drying in the sun

 About three quarters of the way to Jaipur we entered Rajasthan province. There was a noticeable change in the people, who are taller, very attractive, and seem to love brighter colors on their buildings and especially in the clothing of the women. The saris here are also more adorned with heavy gold embellishments.

Look at all the color!

And more at this street market filled with wonderful produce

  From the outskirts of Jaipur on, the housing was ramshackle to falling down, heaps of refuse in the streets, some of which was being eaten by the many cows that live with the people, and utter chaos on the streets and buildings. Yet we were greeted constantly by smiles, waving, even cheers. Indians are such laid back, happy people that we all marveled at the apparent joy they take in living conditions that we would find unbearable. The country is over eighty percent Hindu.  Their philosophy of living lives of duty and ethical peaceful coexistence with all creatures, based on a belief that all of creation is one family, made us think the world would be a far better place if more of us were Hindu.

Our hotel room in Jaipur.  I forgot to take a picture of the lobby.

Our hotel in Jaipur is the Lalit. It is new and probably the most beautiful of our stay--and that is saying something!  The usual dinner buffet was once again excellent with plenty of options for vegan and omnivore alike. There are always a few people who pick at the food and gripe that they can't eat any of it because it isn’t the bland pap they are used to, but most of us think it has been fabulous. I hope the food on the boat will be as good!

Delhi to Agra and the Taj Mahal

April 16, Tuesday. 4am and John is awake and exercising. Noisy as ever, so I'm awake as well. Bah!  Alarm is set for 5, so I guess I'll just shower and get on with it. Luckily, we have actually had pretty good sleep, but I know I'll crash sometime today. Resetting our internal clock is always the hard part, and to my dismay, I had no melatonin to pack. I know it doesn’t work for everyone, but it does for me.

This doesn't begin to convey what a drive through Delhi is really like!

A tuk-tuk and a couple of overloaded mopeds

After a very nice buffet breakfast with plenty of options for omnivores and plant eaters alike, we set off by bus for Agra, the site of the Taj Mahal.  Traffic here is pretty amazing, with trucks, buses, cars, tuk-tuks, motorbikes, pedestrians, and animal-drawn vehicles all vying for road space. Lane markings and even yellow center lines are apparently considered mere suggestions. So it isn't unusual at all to see some amazing maneuvers and vehicles well over on the wrong side of the center line. In addition, the horn seems to be a crucial component of driving here. In fact, our guide specified the three most important needs for drivers are a good horn, good brakes, and good luck.  That last one seems the most crucial to me. Meanwhile, traffic here is best described as chaotic and cacophonous, but apparently with surprisingly few accidents. That can only be the result of copious amounts of luck!

We drove past the famous India Gate

Once free of Delhi traffic, we drove on a new 6 lane highway with almost no traffic at all due to its high tolls. Nice!  It is wheat harvest time here now and we saw many people working the fields, harvesting the grain almost entirely by hand. Little heaps of wheat dotted the fields, then larger piles, and eventually single use "silos" made of wild grasses built to shelter the hay. Brick making was also underway, almost in the same fields, with tall kiln chimneys spewing smoke that made the countryside almost as smoggy as the cities.  Apparently farmers sell their soil to brick makers, who excavate whole fields a few inches down to make bricks. Then the farmers replant the fields with new crops. The result is an odd looking landscape with angular low fields surrounded by high fence lines or even occasionally shrine-topped hills that have not been excavated. How long can this possibly continue before the land can no longer support any kind of crops?  Cow dung is used for fertilizer here, and it seems the people must assume it will maintain fertility, but we couldn't help but wonder about the future of this densely populated, more than slightly impoverished country. We saw people making patties of cow dung and drying them in the sun.  They are then used as both fertilizer and fuel.  Wonderful recycling, really.  The dried patties are piled up and eventually encased in small silo-like structures made of more patties smoothed over with water.  Picturesque until you realize what they are.

Along the way we saw cattle and water buffalo grazing

A young girl making patties and setting them out to dry

About four hours after leaving our hotel in Delhi we arrived in Agra, a "small" city of only 2.5 million, compared with Delhi's 6 million residents.  Traffic in Agra is even worse!  Our guide referred to Agra as typical of the "real" India with truly crazy traffic, overloaded buses and tuk-tuks (made to hold 3, usually with 8 passengers instead), and tippy trucks often drawn by cows or camels. I hope to photograph some of this, but so far I've been on the wrong side of the bus or moving too fast. 

The courtyard of our hotel

Our hotel here is the ITC Mughal.  It is an older hotel, with lovely grounds, large well appointed rooms, and a beautiful lobby. Not as grand or as new as its sister hotel in Delhi, but quite nice. Both hotels have a funny way of numbering rooms. This hotel is only two stories tall but we are in room 641. The other hotel was about nine stories, and our room number was 2589.

Again

Approaching the grounds of the Taj Mahal

We enjoyed a terrific Indian buffet lunch with free flowing wine and lovely food.  After lunch we found our rooms and managed a couple of hours rest before heading to the Taj Mahal for a sunset visit. The sky was a little overcast, and we were sure we were going to be rained on, but in the end, there was only about a minute of light sprinkles, and the lack of strong sun made the heat more bearable.  

The main gate to the Taj Mahal

A smaller side gate

The Taj Mahal is even more beautiful in person than it is in photographs.  Its perfect symmetry and pale color, along with the landscaping, reflecting pool, and size somehow make you almost forget the crowds who are sharing the experience with you.  This monument was built by a great Mughal emperor in memory of his beloved second wife and is possibly the most famous building in the world. We are so glad we took this once in a lifetime pre-tour!

The Taj Mahal

This has turned out to be a day of hard-won lessons for me. We arrived at the Taj  Mahal at around 4:30, took a few pictures, including one of us with our Naples Cruise Club burgee.  Suddenly my camera started acting up and demanding that I reinsert the SD card. Alas, doing that didn't help. I was very unhappy, to say the least, and kicking myself for not bringing the 8GB card from my old camera. In fact, I wished I had brought the whole camera!  But I didn't. I hoped it was a humidity issue that would go away back in the air conditioned hotel, but that was not to be either. And when I tried to transfer the card contents to my iPad, all I got was a message indicating the card was bad. Rats! So lesson one is to always carry more than one SD card. My ruined card is big--16GB, and therefore expensive. I suspect the shots on it are gone forever. It would be much better to have a few four gig cards, especially since I can transfer pictures to the iPad each night. Which, of course, is the next lesson.  I hadn't done that with any of my Delhi pictures yet, so I suspect my photo journey will start after Agra. The only good news I have is that John had an extra card for his video camera that by some miracle is exactly right for me. Whew!  But I would still like to buy another card as soon as I can because he is afraid he will need the extra card he thought to bring. [NOTE: The photos you see in the previous post and this one were captured from John's video or my iPad. I was unable to retrieve anything from my card, even after visiting an expert in Naples. The expert explained one should NEVER delete photos or edit inside the camera, but always on the computer instead.  If you want to delete all photos from the card, you can reformat it within the camera, which he did, restoring my 16 GB card for future use, a small comfort in this debacle.]

My second lesson is to be careful to drink more water.  About the time my camera died, I started feeling light headed, woozy, and a little nauseated. In fact, I didn't even go inside the Taj because I was afraid I would faint. Instead I sat on an outside wall and sipped from my water bottle.  A woman sat down next to me and actually did pass out!  After about an hour of sipping, I began to feel better and soon was myself again. I wonder if giving in to the temptation to have a glass of wine with lunch contributed to my problem. I'm not going to repeat that any time soon, no matter what!  I'll be drinking more, but it will be water until dinnertime.

Dancer

In the evening we were treated to a performance by a local woman and man dancing to Indian music while we enjoyed a drink prior to dinner. We are happy to have excellent options at the buffet dinners here. We love Indian food and are finding this a very easy place for a couple of vegans to eat. 

Everyone is exhausted. Small wonder.  It is 9:30 am in New York now, about twelve hours off from the time here. We fall asleep easily, but wake in the night and struggle to go back to sleep. I sure wish I had some melatonin. 

The Taj Mahal again.  So beautiful!

Our latest trip--Starting in India, ending in Egypt

This beautiful frieze greets arriving passengers in the Delhi airport

April 15 Sunday-Monday.  We have arrived at the  Maurya ITC Hotel in Delhi, (or is it New Delhi?), India.  Our plane landed at 8 pm after a 13+ hour overnight flight from Newark. I was SO happy I took my new self-inflating camp cushion.  It made an astonishing difference in the comfort level of the seats.  John refused to take his and I think is regretting that decision. 

We had a couple of needless scares early in our journey. The first came at the Ft Myers airport when United told us our brand new visas for India had expired. The expiry date read 03/08/2013--which was even before the date of issue. Since It was Sunday, that was a real problem because all offices were closed.  Fortunately, a young United employee came along who realized that everywhere but the US puts the day before the month, meaning our visas expire on August 3 and not March 8. Whew!,  the next hurdle occurred when John learned our vegan meals had not been ordered for the flight. He was sent to three different people and the best he got was they would try.  Sigh. But guess what. The meal choices were chicken or vegetarian. Duh. Absolutely NO problem. And the food was a ten for airplane food. Prior to that we had an early dinner of delicious Chinese at the airport. Eat, eat, eat. We are off to a great start. LOL. The flight crew were excellent.  Our favorite was a tall, beautiful black attendant who was without doubt the happiest stew I've ever encountered. Our sleeping pills worked well so we even arrived fairly rested. Great start!

I had the good fortune to sit next to a beautiful Indian woman on the plane. She is an electrical engineer doing something with sound I didn't understand.  Undergrad in India, masters from Wash U in St Louis where she lived for 8 years until accepting a new job in San Diego a couple of years ago. I'm guessing she is about 32-35. She was heading home to visit her family but for now has no plans to come back permanently, although she says she will have no problem doing that when the time to care for her parents comes.  I asked if many women were in her classes in the states and she said yes, but then it turned out the women were Indian, Chinese, or from some other Asian country. We are making a huge mistake by not encouraging our girls to work toward careers in what we still consider male fields, especially since Asia is encouraging girls to compete in all disciplines. Clearly there is no reason but foolishness for us to allow our girls to succumb to being less than they can be. I would like to see schools actively working to overcome the peer pressure that discourages girls from competing in math and science.  I don't think this is a figment of my imagination or there would have been at least a few American girls in her classes.  This is almost as bad as not educating women at all since we are losing enormous amounts of female brain power to help us compete in an ever shrinking, more globalized world.  It seems very odd to be saying this about the US just as we are embarking on a journey into a part of the world where women are thought to be horribly disadvantaged, but there it is. 

Our hotel is lovely, clearly a five star.  Too bad we will be here only to sleep. Up at five tomorrow morning for out trip to the Taj Mahal. Lots of pictures from now on, I expect. For now, here is one of the garden off the lobby.  No access to it but now I have tried the "through glass" feature of my new camera.  Cool!  What I really want is a picture of the door guy in full regalia.  But I don't want him to pose. I just want a surreptitious shot. We will see if I can pull that off this morning, but I suspect not. I hope there will be more opportunities.

Taken through the lobby window with iPad

Our hotel in Delhi

The lobby dome