Trip to India - day 4

This morning, I had the luxury of sleeping in as I had no early morning train to catch. Only an evening train back to Delhi.

Had a good breakfast, consisting of a mixed fruit lassi and roti paratha, which is actually quite similar to roti canai (a famous type of flatbread in Malaysia). Then, I hired, through the hotel, a driver to Amber Fort, located in Amber, 11km from Jaipur.

As Amber Fort is located up a hill, one can actually hire royal elephants to carry one up the hill. I personally thought it was animal cruelty and walked up instead.


While in Amber Fort, Salman Khan's latest movie, Veer, which was directed by Anil Sharma was being filmed there.

I found out the next day that an accident had occured at Amber Fort later that afternoon. Apparently, a portion of the wall at Amber Fort collapsed, injuring at least 15 people. The stretch of wall collapsed due to the pressure exerted by thousands of spectators standing on it. As a result, there was a minor stampede of people trying to evacuate the scene.

I thanked my lucky stars that I fortunately avoided this. I had left Amber Fort at around 12 noon and it apparently occured around 3-4pm. Phew.....

The driver took me back to Jaipur city and I set out to explore Jaipur, the Pink City on foot. At this point, my camera ran out of battery, thus no more photo-taking opportunities. And I had forgotten to bring my charger with me.

I visited the City Palace, which was built by Maharaja Sawai Jai Singh during his reign. It is quite an impressive palace, quite pretty with his outstanding architecture and art.


Next stop was Jantar Mantar, which is the largest stone observatory in the world. It is one of the five astronomical observatories build by Majaraja Jai Singh, the founder of Jaipur. It is wholly constructed with stone and marble. The observatory has fourteen statistical instruments for measuring time, predicting eclipses and other astronomical events. Amongst all the instruments, the Sundial is the main attraction which tells the time to an accuracy of about two seconds in local time of Jaipur.
As time was running out, I headed back to the hotel and rushed for my 5.40pm train to Delhi. The train was only delayed by 30mins, but this meant that I would reach my destination at around 11pm at night. I could just imagine the chaos at the New Delhi Railway Station at 11pm, with me trying to find a taxi to take me to my B&B and being charged exorbitant rates again. I decided to call ahead and ask the B&B owner what would be a reasonable price to pay and was quoted roughly about Rs200-250.

As predicted, I was hassled by lots of taxi drivers and auto-rickshaw drivers as I got down the train. They try to grab your luggage from you, hoping that you would then have to follow them to their vehicle. Fortunately, I only had one trolley luggage and firmly held on to my luggage, pushing them aside. The prices I was quoted ranged ridiculously from Rs300 to Rs500. I finally managed to bargain for a taxi for Rs250, and it turned out, the driver didn't even know where my B&B was located. He had to stop a few times along the way to ask people. Definitely not reassuring for me.

Finally, I reached my destination, which was a residential home. In a way, the driver was pretty decent as he waited to make sure I was at the right destination before driving off. Thus, I paid him Rs300, which was his original asking price anyway. I probably overpaid again, but oh well...

I was glad that I was now based in this B&B for the next 4 nights. It is extremely tiring to be travelling from one location to the next every day. The constant packing and unpacking is exhausting.