After returning to Delhi and Gurgaon at the end of the Intrepid tour, I set off for five days in Rajasthan. The first stop was in Jaipur, the capital of Rajasthan although only created in the 18th century. Jaipur is known as the pink city but this has to be taken with a grain of salt. For one thing, it was only all daubed this color for the first time a little over a century ago for the visit of a British crown prince. For another, it ain't pink, but more a sort of burnt siena. But it is beautiful if crumbling.
It used to be this yellowish color.
Its most famous building, the palace of the winds, allowed Jaipur's ladies - who were enclosed as much by their Rajput men as Muslim women were by the Mughals - to see what was going on on the street without being seen.
Jaipur's coolest views are of the Jantar Mantar, one of five observatories set up around India to make precise astronomical (and astrological) measurements. This one, the largest, looks like a de Chirico!
Jaipur's funnest building is probably the museum designed by a Brit in the Indo-Saracenic style.Above Jaipur, as above most Rajasthani cities, are a series of forts.
Here's the view of Jaipur from the Temple of the Sun, which I reached from the other side, from a wonderfully still place called Galta - a natural spring (holy too) and a temple carved into the rock around it, and populated by ten thousand monkeys!
This is just the top of it, as seen from the Temple of the Sun looking away from town.
