Jaipur Ride

Jaipur Day 1 - The Forts:
After the Himalayas, Jaipur felt like a different planet. Hot, hazy, dense with traffic, and relentlessly urban in a way that 19,000-foot mountain passes are not. I rented a Royal Enfield Meteor, which is a very different animal from the Himalayan, and headed out to see what the Pink City had to offer.

The answer, it turns out, is forts. A lot of forts.

Amber Fort sits above the city on a ridge, enormous and golden, its reflection sitting in the lake below. Jaigarh Fort crowns the hill above it, connected by a long wall that snakes across the ridgeline like a miniature Great Wall. I walked around Nahargarh, the third fort in the chain, which looks out over the whole sprawl of Jaipur from above. The city from up there is a grey-pink haze stretching to the horizon in every direction, punctuated by the occasional minaret or water tower. A medieval step-well sat tucked into the Jaigarh walls, still and green, one of those details that makes you realize how much engineering went into keeping a city alive up here centuries ago.

Down in the city, Jal Mahal floats in the middle of Man Sagar Lake, a five-storey palace with four storeys submerged. It just sits there, inexplicably, as if someone forgot to drain the lake.

The traffic getting back was, to use the technical term, unhinged.

Jaipur Day 2 - Hawa Mahal:
No photos today, just video, and just the one landmark: Hawa Mahal, the Palace of Winds. Five stories of pink sandstone honeycomb facade rising above one of the busiest intersections in the city. The chaos around it is part of the experience. Auto-rickshaws, trucks, scooters, the odd cow, and me on the Meteor wedged between all of them trying to get a clean angle for the camera.

The building was designed so that royal women could watch street life without being seen. Standing in front of it in gridlocked traffic, I appreciated the concept. The street-level view is relentless.

Two days in Jaipur. Completely different from everything that came before it, and a good way to wind down from two weeks in the mountains.