Sandstorm In A Teacup

Toilet no.3: Jaipur itself

To be honest, I was expecting better. As part of the “golden triangle” that includes Delhi and Agra, Jaipur is one of the major tourist destinations, and according to that bible of utter pap, The Lonely Planet, it “tickles travellers pink”. It also makes them see red.

Jaipur, you see, was painted pink by the Maharaja in 1897 when he welcomed the Prince of Wales, later to become King Edward VII. Pink, you see, is the colour of hospitality, and it seems that most of the city has not received a lick of paint since. The city palace looks superb, and is an oasis of peace in the overcrowded mess of a city that is Jaipur. We spent an hour or so walking around the palace and its many courtyards, and what surprised us most was how every angle had been constructed for a specific view. Some time, long ago, these people were not just architects, they were very, very clever ones.

Next to that is a collection of rather large sundials and astronomical devices (see below), testament to the region’s long-forgotten heritage of geometry and other such things ending in –y. We wandered around, beaten down by the heat and somewhat confused as we were refusing to pay for a guide.

Toilet no.4: Niro’s

Nothing to do with Robert de, but an amiable enough restaurant on the MI road in Jaipur, and they had a rather pleasant toilet (relatively speaking).

On, then, to Jaigarh fort, and it was getting late in the afternoon. The driver took us out of the town and up the hill, winding around and around, honking constantly to warn oncoming drivers that they have to look in front of them every now and again. When we reached the top, a gigantic fort awaited us, and our City Palace tickets would grant us free entrance.

Or rather, they would grant me free entrance, but not Shanaz. She argued for a while, but chivalry, it appears, is a dead concept these days, and only I could enter. Oh, and the taxi driver was allowed to come in, too. He didn’t even have a City Palace ticket, but he’s a bloke and that'll get you anywhere in India, so poor Shanaz had to sit in the taxi and snooze for a while, as I was marched through the fort at record speed by a taxi driver obviously looking forward to the end of the day.

The reason for coming was the self-proclaimed ‘largest cannon in the world’. And I must admit, it was pretty massive as far as cannons go. Either Jai Singh was compensating for something, or he was waiting for the BFG to come and eat him.

The fort is maintained by the Air Force, and an English-speaking guide, obviously impressed by the panama hat, insisted that he tell me all about it.

This cannon was only ever fired once – as a test by Jai Singh, the founder of Jaipur, in 1720. It fired one cannonball over 30km, and the noise was so loud that the walls of houses split in two, pregnant women lost their children, people were deafened, and one cannonball was reported missing. It was what in modern parlance we would call a “massive PR disaster”. I must have shown a little too much interest, as my guide was now delving even further into his bottomless pit of facts and figures, telling me the exact percentage of each metal that went into making the cannon and then, as he moved from the cannon to the fort itself, the exact amount of water each container could hold – and there were over 20 containers. By the time he had completed listing the exact length of every staircase in the fort, our taxi driver had made sufficient indications that the sun had gone down, perhaps forever, for the guide to acknowledge that maybe, just maybe, he had gone into enough detail for one day.

Who knows, perhaps I was his only tour of the day.