Slept well, oddly, as it was bloody cold. But we were up with a rush with the others at 5 or 6 or something ridiculous to get out at the station before Jodhpur to catch our connecting train on to Jaipur. We were lucky with that train – all the carriages were locked from the inside, but an Indian passenger was good enough to open up a door for us. It was a reserved carriage, but it was now past 6.30, the time when, theoretically, the bunks should come down, converting 3 berths to 4 seats. Not everyone had done this, of course, but there were a couple of seats for us.
The journey was nondescript, + deposited us in Jaipur in the early afternoon. I rushed off to book our room at the Evergreen Hotel – Quite a few people had said that that was where they were going, so we thought it best to make sure of a room – while Val tried to arrange our travel to Delhi on Thurs or Fri. I booked the last of the cheaper rooms, which proved the wisdom of our move. Not that I was so very sure I was doing the right thing, for the room was still bloody expensive by Rajasthani standards, + bare, barren, + not clean. The whole place was dirty, in fact, making me wonder how the place had got the glowing recommendations from more than one source. But, after Val arrived, we discovered at least a partial truth, for the restaurant turned out to be both cheap + excellent.
After indulging ourselves there for a while, we walked to the old city to look around. I was disappointed, however, for not only was it fantastically busy, it was nothing like as attractive as I had imagined – the famed Pink City was in fact a grubby orange. The touts too were a pest – only when I am in the very best of moods can I treat them with humour.
During the evening, I spent a long time sewing patches onto my pink Yogyakarta trousers. They have worn so thin they are melting away, + I have taken over from Val the largest part of the chore of keeping them together, largely because she is refusing to put in the required massive effort singlehanded. Actually, I have described it as a chore, but it is something of a pleasure, bordering on obsession. In Jaisalmer I picked up scraps of material from the ground outside tailors’ shops, lending variety to the colour scheme, making it more like a work of art – Chris + his Amazing Technicolour Trousers.
Regrettably, no photos seem to exist of this creation. As for Jaipur, I suspect my somewhat bitter comments were as much a result of being fed up with travelling as anything else.
