Jaipur, Rajasthan

At last we're in the Pink City! Though from where we are it's not very pink at all. We arrived at 2345 last night, making our journey more than 24hrs long! Exhausting stuff, but we're here and we've had a pretty comprehensive tour of Rajasthan into the bargain! I thought that Rajasthan was all desert, I mean real desert, but it isn't. It's just very very dry. The rivers stretch like huge scars across the landscape which is burnt and yellow. Lots of cacti around and various patches of green from the plants. Some of it is irrigated and you get hit by sudden expanses of paddy that look so out of place.

Later, 9:30pm

We've had an exhausting day of exploring one of India's most famous cities and meeting the strangest people. The City Palace has a museum of textiles (containing a gold-embroidered dress that weighs 9 and a half kilos!) and an Arms museum full of very ornate tools of death. the palace is very strange, big courtyards each with a small building in the centre. The yards are surrounded by walls that contain hundreds of rooms.

On the way out we were accosted by hundreds of shops selling Indian miniatures, beautiful Rajasthani clothes and cloths, all at ridiculous prices. I argued with one man whose silk scarves were worse quality than the one I got from Bangalore, but the same price. I soon beat his 'con the ignorant tourist' banter with my talk of 30 and 50 gram silks, then didn't buy anything. I got a cotton one for Rs60 - after he'd asked Rs220 for it! It shows how much they're really worth when he's prepared to knock that much off the price! Bargaining definitely pays, but it helps if you know your stuff.

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The chap who designed the Pink City, Jai Singh was a keen astronomer and he built a huge observatory called Jantar Mantar. looking more like a huge playground than an observatory, it is dominated by an enormous sundial with a gnomon (so the Guide calls it) that is 30m tall! We didn't understand most of it because we were being too stingy to get a guide!

Outside I found a snake charmer whose snake kept trying to attack passers-by, he tried to get Rs50 out of me but I'm too experienced now.¹ I wish we could have little 'Not Your Usual Tourist!' stamps so they'd think twice about trying it on. A trick of the auto-drivers here is to charge for two people, thus doubling the usual fare. All the ones outside our hotel this morning refused to just take us to the City Palace, they wanted to give us a tour of Jaipur as well. Everything's in the centre of town so why bother? They can be pretty exasperating but we know all their tricks.

The Hawa Mahal or 'Palace of Winds' was an interesting sight. Again consisting of more courtyards than actual palace, the Hawa Mahal has a huge façade with 593 windows of varying sizes through which women of the court could watch street processions without being seen. It's that Muslim thing again, women hiding behind closed doors - terrible stuff. Outside, a man offered me 150 dollars for my watch, which was extremely tempting - Rs5,000 for a £30 watch isn't bad. I thought I'd better wait until Madras before giving up my timepiece though!²

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The black market seems to be very strong here and we spent the rest of the day with unsavoury characters. The first was a boy who claimed he was 21 and spent much of his time boasting about his 'European Girl' conquests. He had a brother called Bobbi who was in the jewellery business (more later). We lost him in the end - after we decided he was a rent boy - when he had to meet some friends (Can't keep his clients waiting! C. quipped). But it wasn't over yet.

We decided to find the GPO after the central museum was closed and someone else stepped into our path and offered us chai. Feeling sociable (and thirsty) we accepted and entered the world of the Extremely Rich. He works / co-owns a jewellery shop which deals in precious stones and gold. He had a huge ruby about the size of a football on his desk! Anyway, in we went, fascinated and making polite conversation with a strange Italian man³ and an over-rich, over-travelled Indian who kept swearing in the wrong places.

I felt really silly - we're here with the church, teaching, no we're not being paid - I felt like I should light up, put my feet on the desk and start complaining about the price of heroin these days. When we left, we said goodbye to the bloke who brought us there (He had very red eyes - kept rubbing his nose and sniffing). I think they were glad to see us go really and we were glad to leave.

We met another two characters like this, who started the conversation with Can I ask you one thing? I tried to talk to a European girl and she said 'go away, fuck off'. Are all Europeans like that? A novel way to start and in due course they took us to another jewellery shop. We thought they were taking us to a place where handicapped people worked, but found ourselves on the roof of a very high building, talking to a chap called 'Bobbi'.

He told us about his business and how the government taxes jewellery very highly. But Bobbi has a way round this. He finds (stupid) tourists who carry jewels to Europe for him, as 'gifts', then he buys them back for a huge profit, paying for their flight and stay in India. Because Europe is so expensive, he can do this and still make money when they're sold.

We didn't take him up on the inevitable offer - tempting though it was, but he did let me buy a a very nice solid silver ring!⁴ I don't know how legal it all is and have no plans to find out really, he said he has lots of couriers so why worry for more? So that's how jewellers make their profit. Bobbi pays his child-labourers minimum wages (50 paise per ring = 1p) and sells his wares at European prices., which are increased again for the big name shops. Jaipur's the place then, if you want to make money.