Ranthambore to Jaipur

We were both excited about visiting Jaipur as is it has been described as a beautiful pink city. The pictures we have seen show beautiful palaces and pink buildings at sunset. However, when we arrived, we were extremely disappointed. Like most places we have visited we had high expectations and visions of magical kingdoms surrounded in beauty, however, in the flesh most of the buildings just have not been well kept, have hardly anything inside them which is of particular historic interest, and generally the buildings need a good clean.

We started our time in Jaipur by walking up to the temple on the outskirts of the city known as monkey kingdom. As the name suggests, there were monkeys everywhere, and surprisingly a few bulls hanging around just for the fun of it- strange but oh well hey ho!

Once at the top of the temple you could see the entire city, but as I have said it was far from the idyllic. However, this did not deter us, and we headed back down to the old part of the city which was clothed in pink, as promised, and looked quite pretty as the sun was going down.

That evening we sat on the rooftop of our hotel and had dinner. It was a really nice chilled out evening, and what made it more interesting was that we got talking to some people from the Netherlands - the first travellers we have really seen so far!

The next morning, armed with out Lonely Planet we were much happier and wanted again to ditch our driver Chand. We were dropped off in the city, and despite spending ages lost, as none of the streets have any names, we got a ride to some bazaars. We attempted to do the city walk however after visiting the city palace, which we had both really looked forwards to, we decided we had had enough of monuments! Most of them were again spoiled by tourism and were in many ways tacky, which was very disappointing and surprising.

We went back into the city to go shopping! Natalie was on a mission; it was so entertaining to see her barter with the locals, she was a pro! We spent the day being invited into lots of boutiques where we were shown every garment of clothing you can think of, from cushion covers to handbags, it was like Aladdin's cave. And despite showing no interest in buying a brown sari covered in sequins, or a handmade rug or even Indian slippers (they were not must-haves on my lists of things to buy for my rucksack to be fair), we sat and were shown them in every colour imaginable! It was so much fun talking to the locals and fighting our way back onto the streets.

After an exhausting day in the sun we met Chand He asked us 20 questions again, making sure we were ok and checking that we managed to talk to people other than him - we reassured him that we coped very well and that we had actually done the communicating thing a few times before! I apologize for my lack of sincerity, but after nearly two weeks with him, he does start to wear you down.

We spent the evening at the top floor of another hotel in the city, where we ate vegetarian cuisine in their revolving restaurant. This was a strange experience, which left Natalie feeling rather seasick, yet it had lovely views on the city from all angles, which was nice to see lit up at night!