Post Assignment Travel - Jaipur

Jaipur's stop 4 on my tour of North India. We only had one day here. We traveled to Jaipur by night train, class AC/2, which means the carriage is air conditioned and has two bunks on a wall. The bottom one also turns into a seat.

Jaisalmer is less that 100 km from the Pakistan border so there's a number of very large Indian army bases and therefore there were lots of army staff on the train and lots of army sites beside the train. This peacock is sitting on a carriage intended to move tanks. There we're tanks there on the way in but gone on the way back, so no photo.  

We struggled to get tickets so made use of Tatkal tickets. Under this scheme there's a small percentage of tickets that are released the day before the train leaves. They cost a bit more, but a least we had tickets.

Even though it was a night train it was quite busy. I found it that the train movement made it easier to sleep but were next to the door which squeaked very loudly. Then someone got on about half way and turned on the light whilst the mucked around for what seemed ages setting up their bed.

The train got to Jaipur at 5am. Even then there was heaps of people at the station.

In Jaipur we visited the Hawa Mahal, or Palace of the Breeze.

The Amber Fort. It was quite a long walk up to the fort from the road. We we're told it was possible to ride an elephant up. It would have been expensive and wasn't something I wanted to do but I would have been interested to see them. But no elephants today.

And Jantar Mantar. This is a World Heritage Site. It's an observatory that was built around 1730 by Maharaja Jai Singh. There was a number of instruments, including a sundial accurate to 2 seconds.

At the observatory it was interesting to see how accurate the various instruments were.