The adventure

We boarded the PoW's in Delhi for a 1 week round trip.

In our carriage there were 4 bedroom / ensuites and a small sitting room that we shared with the other 3 cabins. Breakfast was served there by our 2 room butler guys.

We had a couple from NYC, Cydonia and Barry, really switched on and good fun. A 27 year old girl, Jennifer also from New York, who had just resigned as a currency broker from Goldman Sachs to do a spot of travelling, and finally a Pommie couple from Sydney who were 40/50 odd. Liz and Steve were school teacher and electrician trade-unionist; naturally Garry kept the conversation to religion and sex.

The First Day

We traveled most of the time overnight. First day we woke in Jaipur where we caught a bus to drive thru the city past the Palace of Winds, or Hawa Mahal, where harem women sat concealed behind stone screens with a cool breeze to watch the street markets. This amazing building is only 1 room deep – a bit like a Hollywood façade.

Then on up to the base of the Amber Palace fort on the cliff top. The very steep narrow road to the top was easy on elephant back. The hawkers are every where trying to sell things – they throw their goods up to you!!!

After that tour we went back down town and after lunch in a luxurious Taj hotel which is one of the more recent palaces that have been converted into a hotel. We very often ate lunch in these palaces.

This is very common, the 15 or 20 remaining Moguls or regional rulers get taxed on their wealth. Since they own a lot of property they either must put it to work by leasing it out to hotel chains etc, or they legally pass title to a trust. In this case they then often take a leading board position to supervise the management of museums and tourist sites etc. But this means they no longer personally own the palaces and forts.

New Palace

Next we went to the new palace behind the Hawar Mahal or the windy windows building (the one room deep façade). The Maharajah, Sawai Jai Singh born 1688 AD, who reigned during the 18 th century first established Jaipur. He built a number of observatories around India, with the show piece inside the grounds of this palace. They are typically enormous sun dials and devices for predicting astrological birth signs etc, but they showed that he had a very good knowledge of astronomy.

See where the two people on the right are pointing – the suns shadow cast from the marble edge of the stair case makes it possible to read the time to within 20 seconds. The big one he built later, 5 storey's high, of this same design records time in 5 second intervals. Sailers came from Bombay and Calcutta to reset their navigational chronometers.

Just by the way – see the cows wandering down this road – it is a very busy main street in Jaipur – and they are going the wrong way on the wrong side. There really are cows all over the place – you just walk right by them and try not to get hit by their tail as the swish it about. Jaipur is also the gem cutting center for colored stones in India and one of the worlds leading places for emeralds (although most are imported here as rough and then cut and polished).

There are two almost identical versions of this swimming pool sized hollow hemispherical marble structure, side by side. An entrance from below makes it possible to walk around and measure the position of the planets and daily time for very accurate birth zodiac and astrologic predictions. The adjoining structure had the missing parts of the hemisphere in place. There are fine curved lines engraved into the marble for astrological predictions.

That night we went back to the train for dinner, the on board food was just OK, and the wine was very expensive so we mainly drank a beer or two. It was a very long overnight train journey. Sleeping on a rocking train is just wonderful; the only complaints I heard were that when ever we stopped to let another train past as we were sometimes on single track lines - we would often wake up when the rocking stopped.