The Pink City of Jaipur...(but with a lot of blue buildings like Jodhpur)

Jaipur itself is nice enough with a modern feel. What we mean by that is that there are proper shops with prices shown & everything (God it's going to be tough going into Boots & not questioning the price of goods & not having to haggle & ask for the best price & then haggle some more & maybe offer to buy several items in order to bargain for a discount). In fact Jaipur is so modern that in some parts of the city there are pavements! Some of them you can actually walk on! There's even a pelican crossing with a little green man & everything. Drivers don't necessarily stop for the little green man & they still drive up the wrong side of the street & the fumes are still pretty bad but overall we liked Jaipur. It also had Maccy D's and a Baskin & Robbins!


We visited quite an impressive building called the Hawa Mahal in the Old City which was great. Built in the 16th C it included little windows that were used by the Maharaja's daughters and wives to look at the plebs & watch daily life without the hassle of leaving the fort & having to come into contact with beggars & cow dung. There were a lot of temples and forts in and around Jaipur... We visited the Amber Fort and Nahargarh Fort too. This is when we got a real introduction to the monkey's as well as seeing some amazing views from the fort's positions on the hills around the city.

The ultimate monkey experience though was the monkey temple. Here we tried to ply the monkeys with peanuts in exchange for action photos. This was my favourite part of the trip...we got some really cool photos and I could have stayed up there all day feeding them peanuts...if I'd had about 20 thousand bags of them!



















We also visited a kind of orphanage (they prefer to call it a children's village) that is run by the SOS children's foundation. Children are brought to them mainly by the police, because they've been abandoned in rubbish bins and other awful places. They range in age between 0 and 18 and every group of ten kids lives in an apartment with a 'mother' (a full time artificial mother for them who has also suffered trauma at some stage of her life). When we got there we didn't actually get to meet the kids that lived there as they were in school, but we did meet a group of other slum kids who come in as part of an outreach project that the village also runs so that the poor kids can use the facility during the day and also get a good feed everyday.
So we played some footy with the boys (Andy) and sat and giggled and chatted with the girls (Vanessa) and we had a really good time. The work they're doing there is really inspiring...but they also seem to be managing pretty well too with European funding as they had good equipment and apartments etc. Seeing the smiles and giggles on the kid's faces though was a real treat...!












Should also mention our favourite rickshaw driver here as well. The first guy we've met that hasn't tried to get one over on us or take us to his friends, uncles, second cousins shop for a great discount. Surjeet was a great guy and also managed to get us a good deal on a taxi to Agra as we moved on to the penultimate stop on our trip round India.