This Is A Lake - A travel blog

Today’s main attraction was to visit Amber Fort, which is not in Jaipur city but in the nearby town of Amber (it’s pronounced “amer”). For this I had hired a driver through my hotel, supposedly to take me on a tour of Amber Fort, Hawa Mahal and Jal Mahal -although when he picked me up at the hotel he went “Where to, sir?” so I don’t think he was very up-to-date on the program! I was disappointed to see that the visit to Hawa Mahal consisted of a literal drive-by of the facade I saw yesterday. I thought he’d drop me off so I could go inside. Still, I wanted to reserve my strength for the fort so I nodded along and next we stopped at the Jal Mahal. On the road we crossed camels and even an elephant, a real elephant just walking down the road. The Jal Mahal is an odd palace that is built right in the middle of a lake, and I don’t mean on an island in a lake, I mean the building itself juts out of the water. It’s closed to the public, so I have no idea what’s inside, but I th

Jaipur gave me a very good first impression: the morning was sunny, warm without being uncomfortably hot (25-27°C), and the pollution levels are much better than in Delhi and especially Agra. It’s still high on the meters, but there’s no sickly haze hanging in the air and breathing is noticeably easier. In addition, as I would find out through the day, Jaipur is way more developed than Agra, with paved roads and streets and larger buildings. It’s still India, so there’s still lots of crazy traffic in all directions and people trying to sell you stuff, but walking from one site to another was easier than in Agra, where it was so inhospitable so as to be impractical. But I’m getting ahead of myself. I started off with breakfast at the hotel -I was a bit spooked to find myself being the only guest in the big, garish dining hall; I wondered what was going on but people started filing in afterwards, I guess I must be an early riser here- and then I took an Uber to the old town of