Chapter 44: Elephants and Infernos

Our day’s touristry in Jaipur. Man it is hard to write on an Indian train. Anyway. We started with breakfast, which isn’t really worth mentioning, but look, there I’ve gone and mentioned it anyway. We then met our tour guide, who had been recommended to us, and then we were off. The man explained interesting historical tidbits about Jaipur as we drove along, almost all of which has slipped my mind, naturally, but of course you don’t want to read about those things anyway because those are the sorts of things that you find in a crusty book in a library and not in the weblog of an easily amused youth, which tends to involve more things like cobras. Yes, you guessed it, there was a cobra waiting for us when we stopped along the side of the road to take the quintessential touristy shot of the Amber Fort along the ridgetop. That’s right, a cobra in a basket, a snakecharmer, and a baby elephant.

The baby elephant I liked—elephant hair is hilarious. The snake charmer was kinda like what, oh come on. Nobody actually does that. But I guess they do, and that cobra looked like it would sooner write a Shakespeare sonnet than lash out lethally at a passing tourist or small furry rodent.

We then took an elephant ride up the maharaja’s private driveway to the fort, a ride which I’m sorry to say I severely disliked. Aside from the basic moral implications of elephant slavery, it was pure torture just trying to stay on the thing as it careened up the hill at about twice the speed of any of the other fifty or so elephants making the climb. A maniac, our elephant was. I think I dislocated my hip hanging on for dear life.

We then went and saw the fort which was pretty neat and historically fertile but unfortunately very hot. I officially hate Jaipur for the weather alone, regardless of how interesting anything in it might be.

After the fort we took a stop by a textile croblyn. I have absolutely no idea what a croblyn is, but that’s what I seem to have written in my book, so until I work on my legibility skills, I’m just gonna go with it. Now that I liked. First we watched them block printing big sheets and tablecloths and the like. It was pretty cool to watch the big bedspreads that I’ve always had being printed right there, all by hand with carved wooden blocks, little old guys lining up the designs by eye and hammering them onto the cloth. We got to try our hands at it ourselves, adorning a little square of cloth with a green elephant labeled “INDIA”. Fun times.

We then went around the corner to the rug looms where these three little guys were furiously knotting away. We were invited to sit down with them on their little benches and give it a go, which I personally thought was way cool. I was assisted by a little old man with the most cheerful toothless smile in the world. I then went over to watch various people stretching the rugs to dry, hemming up the edges, combing them, trimming them, burning and scraping them, and washing them with big wooden paddles. The actual rug making process of course goes in an entirely different order than that, but that’s the order I saw them in and anyway, I don’t know what the correct one is. Then we met the owner, got marketed to for a while, and ultimately left having purchased much more than intended as per India shopping custom.

Titbit fact: Jaipur holds the Guinness world records both for the finest rugs and for the largest sundial, which is where we proceeded to go after we were done at the croblyn. The old observatory, more accurately, which happens to include the world largest sundial. The observatory was built over two hundred years ago by one of the maharajas and is, quite frankly, amazing. All the instruments are hand-carved perfectly out of marble, still accurate up to two seconds. Oh come on, don’t try and tell me that’s not way cool. A different instrument for every sign of the zodiac, instruments for tracking the constellations, the seasons, the moon, and of course, the really freaking huge sundial which was so tall that my right leg gave out when I got back down from climbing to the top of it. No really, it was a pretty bizarre sensation.

We saw the textile and craft museums (ho hum) and then went to a gem shop (you can’t go to Jaipur and not look at gems) where I discovered that blue topaz is gorgeous beyond all measure.

I guess I don’t really have much more to say about the day. It was fascinating, it was hideously, monstrously, heinously, grotesquely, obscenely, punishably hot (and it’s only March, mind you), and now I’m on a train back to Delhi. My trip is almost over, and I’m ready for it. Two (well, three) more days and then Austria, here I come.