First Class Sleeper Cars are the Best!!!!!

Udaipur to Jaipur tonight in a sleeper car compartment of our own! Bless the first class car. We will not have to listen to a man with a very bad snoring, snorting and grunting issue. None of the rest of us (3) got a lick of sleep on the train from Amdabad to Udaipur. But tonight it will be bliss! Only the two of us to share this luxurious car. Now it is not as fancy as say, the Orient Express, but to my eyes tonight, I guess there was a good reason to pay the extra few dollars to go. We even have an electric plug on the wall. Now if there were wi-fi our lives would be wonderfully hooked up.

Udaipur was pretty but a bit of a tourist haven. Lots of girls from elsewhere dressed in Indian traditional clothing but looking so shiny clean and pressed. The big palace was visible from our haveli (small hotel). We had a view of the lake and the 5 star hotel, which was an island in the middle of the lake and was one another of the maharaja palaces. It seems that those guys did not have a grip at all on how poor much of the rest of their town was. This is a city with more artists per square foot on the tourist side than you can imagine. There are art schools every block or so but they are not teaching creativity but instead copying. And the big thing to copy was the miniature painting of one elephant, one horse and one camel. Man o man! If I heard it once, I heard it a dozen times. The elephant for happiness, the horse was for strength, and the camel for love. How they came up with that is beyond me because I did not believe camels really liked people.

Actually, the regular people were nice, it was the sales hawkers outside each and every shop that wore you down. Lots of hype and each of them was the absolute master and each of them only had the real pashmina from Kashmir. No one wanted to hear that you really did not want to come into their shop not now or never. So, we beat it to the other side of town with our cameras and photographed a bit and found some funky beat up old dolls that we bought for a song. We spent each day walking and making pictures some and then we would do one of the requisite tour things like see the palace and museum of miniature and not so miniature paintings, or go on the boat ride around the lake. We did not take the trips that the guy at the internet store next to our hotel was trying to get us to do. We did not go up to the monsoon palace up the mountain and see the sunset on the town after paying dearly for the ride up there. We did not take the 100 mile trip up to some temples and craft villages. Why would we come to the town just to take a look and leave? Seemed like that was not a good idea, so he just had to be disappointed. All he really wanted was our money. He was a tour provider.

We did go with our waiter from last night to a craft outlet outside of town where the prices and the quality was much better. And if there was no issue with money, the old beautiful pieces at this place were museum quality and giant. We did not partake of those.

The train station was interesting tonight. As the train began to pull into the station, it was like someone set the crowd on fire and they began to run and jump onto the moving train in the general seating cars just beyond ours. No one had come yet to post the reservation sheets on the side of the cars so I stood there in a bit of horror watching the scene. Keith was trying to find out where they were posting the reservations. What a scene!

Holi festival is beginning. It really is just the beginning of the few day celebration. There are all kinds of squirt guns for colored water; the pigment powder is abundance at the stands. Kids squirt you as you walk by and have water balloons ready to go. Tonight as we were about to leave fireworks were seen in the sky a couple places. Jaipur will be doing the same and we will have to decide which of our cloths we don’t care about because they will be all stained in color from then on. I am anxious to photograph the celebration but will need to find a place above the crowd for my camera. We did bring camera raincoats but how they will work is still unknown. Everyone seems to love Holi.

So now I am just going to sit back and enjoy the train ride until we decide to turn in to a night of sleeping bliss. We won’t get into Jaipur until 6 am. It is now about 11 so sleeping should begin very soon.

Morning Arrival in Jaipur in the dark.

We arrived after having a mostly good sleep but it was short. The train rocks you as you lay in your berth. The first class compartment proved to be wonderful. It was peaceful and the privacy was well needed. We arrived and were collected by a man named Ali who brought us to the Diggi Palace, an old haveli which seems quite nice. It is not an over the top place, nor expensive but one where you could stay without lots of worry and not lots of frills but nice old furniture in what seems to be good size rooms. We waited in the open lounge for the haveli to awaken and for the beginning of the 7am breakfast starting time. There are nice gardens, shade trees, enormous covered porches and quiet. The place could be used for a study abroad stop if we do the central part of India or the golden triangle portion. There is no wireless here only plug in computer connections. I am a bit sad about that because I love sitting in bed working on stuff.

We saw Suki just after we ate a small breakfast. She will lend us her driver and we will be shown some of the better sites that are not readily known to visitors. We will also see her Anoki Museum and the show she curated. Today we want to see the observatory in town and a wedding market in the bazaar which I hear is pretty great. We will also head out to Monkey Temple.

So, we will begin a new experience here in Jaipur. Here’s hoping it is as good an experience as it portends to be.

We will load images when we have a faster internet connection and then update this because we have been in Jaipur for a couple days and will leave tomorrow night/day after tomorrow morning....