Day 9:
February 15, 2005: Jaipur to Agra, via Fatehpur Sikri
In the morning we went to the City Palace in Jaipur. Highlights: the textile collection (amazing old embroidered gowns and robes, along with the Maharajah's billiards garb and polo outfit!) and the largest silver vessels in the world (two gigantic silver urns used by Madho Singh II to carry water from the Ganges when he travelled to London in 1902: like us travelling in India, I guess, he didn't trust the local water.) 243 kilograms of silver was required to cast each urn, and each can hold 8,182 gallons of water. Nifty.
We spent a short while watching workmen repair the city's trademark pink finish.
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We also stopped briefly by the Hawa Mahal, the "Palace of Winds," built so that the ladies could watch the busy street without leaving purdah.
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Then we returned to our hotel, where we grabbed takeaway lunch (chapatis and little tupperwares of dal and curried potatoes) and headed out in a car again, another white Ambassador, this time driven by a grey mustached fellow named Vijay. We were nervous about the drive, given how unpleasant the previous day's trip had been, but we'd been told that the train to Agra would take seven hours while the drive would take only five (and that with a stop along the way for sightseeing).
Fortunately, we got a much pleasanter drive this time. Eastern Rajasthan is surprisingly green. We drove past endless mustard fields, green and waving, here and there a woman in the fields. Past trucks laden with straw, in enormous burlap sacks.
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Past the usual cement-box small businesses, many painted with garish Hindi ads for underwear or tractors. Past thatched houses, many with black cows tethered in the yards. On the roofs, round patties of cow dung dried; in front of most of the houses, the dried patties were stacked in spiraling cylinders, like the local variation on the stacks of cordwood one finds here in New England. (Since the dung is used for fuel, the comparison actually makes some sense.)
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Then we drove past fields of red and yellow bricks, stacked; past tall triangular smoking chimneys which we think were brick kilns. Past camels, some painted or shaved in interesting patterns.
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Late in the afternoon we arrived at Fatehpur Sikri, once the palace complex of the Moghul Emperor Akbar. He had the vast red sandstone complex built by a crew of twenty thousand men, in just twelve years, finished in 1585; he moved there with his three wives, one Muslim, one Hindu, and one Christian. When the settlement ran out of water, they abandoned it and moved to Lahore.
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We hired a guide, who snuck us in the back way so we wouldn't have to pay. We entered through an enormous red sandstone arch with Qur'anic arabic inscriptions up and down both sides, the arch at the top adorned with odd flat beehives. (The entry to the Taj Mahal the following day would look strikingly similar, and was built a hundred years later.)
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Inside the archway, huge red sandstone pavilions, and a marble sanctuary built as a mausoleum to honor the Sufi saint Salim Chishti (whose advice enabled the monarch to bear a son), where we made an offering of a piece of woven fabric and a handful of marigolds.
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Outside Chishti's mausoleum, a reflecting pool, where pilgrims washed hands and feet before entering.
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My favorite part of Fatehpur Sikri was the courtyard, down the cobblestone path, where the three queens had their small palaces. It was devoid of tourists; only a couple of Indian kids playing cards and a swooping plethora of bright green parrots were there to share it with us. From there we could look out over the green fields to the ancient city walls, past the caravanserai where visitors once stayed, past the spiked elephant tower (a minaret built on the grave of Akbar's apparent favorite elephant).
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Afterwards we drove on to Agra, through vegetable markets and dusty and chaos and packed streets. We checked in at the Holiday Inn, giggling at the marble lobby and chandeliers. The restaurant claimed to be an Olive Garden, which was temporarily very exciting, but it turned out to be another mediocre buffet; I didn't trust the Western items, so ate curry again. Oh, well.
The bathtub was similarly exciting when I first saw it, but turned out to be a little anticlimactic; the bath was a little less hot and a little more sedimenty than I prefer. Can't win 'em all, I guess.
Or, back to the index.