Jaipur

We had six days in Jaipur arriving tired and confused after our train from Jodhpur was three and half hours late.  At the station we were bombarded with touts looking for our business but eventually found a prepaid taxi stand where our charming old driver took us to our airbnb via a few 'phone calls to Payal the owner.

I'd been expecting Jaipur to be more urban and sophisticated than the cities to which we'd recently been and in some ways it is, but the noise and dirt were still overwhelming.  We visited the City Palace on our first full day, where I pictured this pigeon happily perched in a chandelier and as ever we had to force our way through the crowds.  Payal and Anurag our hosts were charming and Anurag took me out to the Central Park jogging path on a couple of mornings and we also took Payal's cooking class one afternoon, which was a really good introduction to Indian cooking techniques.

Payal is a very knowledgeable guide to Indian cookery and culture and gave us some really good tips about the basics of Indian cookery in which I finally understood why ground coriander is sold in such large quantities in India delis, as most basic sauces start with a mixture of chilli powder, turmeric and ground coriander which act to provide heat, spice and a thickening agent.  Unfortunately during the lesson I began to feel sick and for several days since then I've had first diarrhea and then a bad cold.

On our last full day we booked a car and driver and took in the sights we hadn't managed to get round to, including the Amber Fort, a vast palace complex outside the City which was abandoned after Jaipur was founded and the temples at Galta also known as the "Monkey Temples" for obvious reasons.

Galta kind of sums up some of my feelings about our trip to date.  I was expecting something beautiful and what I found was something dirty, confusing and in some ways ugly.  The ponds at the site are green and fetid and the whole area smells of decay.  Gradually you lose some of the smell and the rubbish as you climb to the Sun Temple at the top of the narrow valley in which the temples sit, but still it all feels a bit tawdry and played out, or perhaps that's me projecting my feelings after three exhausting and bewildering weeks in India.