Jaipur

The Hawa Mahal was commissioned by Maharaja Sawaj Pratap Singh to enable his rather large harem of chicks to be able to watch parades and the like. Purdah was in fashion at the time so women were always covered / hidden. Everyone tells us that the bloke above built it, but we are pretty sure he never lifted a finger while there was all that food to be eaten and all those women to service.

A bustling city of two and a half million people, and it still has elephants, camels and horses riding through the main streets with the modern traffic.

We knew we were hitting the tourist zone in the Royal Palace when this happens.

After seeing some 100 or so of these animal torturers Jason finally succumbs to the temptation of taking a photo.

Jason wants a pellet gun to shoot the cobra to annoy it into biting the bloke.

After being attacked by beggars, hawkers, and tuk tuk drivers for our first few hours, Claire is now at the stage of asking how to punch properly.... Just in case the appropriate occasion should arise. Numerous men try and grope Claire in India so the appropriate occasion might not be so far away.

Nice tash, are you single?

The otherwise fairly drab royal palace, was brought alive by a bit of show of a parading elephants & horses, and a man wearing a fake camel and dancing around like a twat. Apparently this was a special show for a couple of busloads of loaded looking Euros.

Speaking of loaded. For about US$800 you can have dinner with the king.

If you were overly endowed with that sort of cash, you might not be surprised with the size of this elephants member. Fortunately one of the parading elephants had something for the other elephant. Something we would have paid a lot of money to see inserted while both elephants still had their respective mahoots on board.

Next stop was the Jantar Mantar. It's an old-school observatory containing the worlds biggest sundial and some pretty big kit for predicting eclipses and finding constellations. Now it looks like a big kitsch sculpture garden around which you can be guided by the dashing man in the black. Kind of a camp Indian 007.

Jaipur is the pink city because when King Albert of England visited the Raj, he had the town painted pink.

This woman has powdered the rock to make the pink paint. It's is worth noting that only women appear to do manual labour in India.

Stumbling home on the first night, we got a little bit lost on one of Jason's shortcuts, and stumbled across a parade. We would have found out what it was, and what it was for but so much happens everyday in India that after a while you don't care.

The next day, we hired Abdul and his little tuk tuk to see the sites around Jaipur. First stop was the impressive royal cenotaphs which some boys were just arriving at to whack a cricket ball around. This photo is of the Jal Mahal, situated in the middle of the lake it is closed to the public and like much of Indias cultural heritage appears to be rotting.

Next stop was Tiger Fort, where the king used to live with his nine queens. The king had his own passage way to sneak from room to room servicing who he chose. Apparently this method stopped the others from being jealous.

Our guide was a bit of a perve and pointed out that this painted border was of the queens lying prostate with their legs spread.

Our guide also thought he was a bit of a photographer, making us pose for photos, and even doing Claire's hair. We let this go on for two photos before telling him he was the weirdest Indian we had met and we were leaving now.

The usual "can we please have a photo with you?" At least these two asked Claire directly rather than asking Jason if they can have a photo with his "piece of meat".

Last but not least, was the Amber Palace. Claire had been here ten years ago and couldn't wait to show Jason the room of stars. (We have since found the room is closed to the public as tourists had been collecting souvenirs from the room.) The palace is now covered in graffiti and anything that shines below hand level has been torn off as a souvenir.

This part of the ceiling is still beautiful, as a tourists would need to bring a ladder to be able pull of a piece of this and take it home.

Distressed, Claire asked to see the curator of the palace to find out what had gone wrong over the last 10 years. As usual we found ten people doing nothing, all shirking responsibility and even unable to provide us with an address to which to register our discourse.