Jaipur - The Pink City

We arrived in Jaipur and stayed at the Holiday Inn! It was probably our best India hotel. And the perfect hotel for the night I was sick. We slept well!

The next day we (well, Myra) ate breakfast and we met our guide and off we went...

They call Jaipur the Pink City because all the buildings in the old city have a pink tone to them. Apparently it's because the King way back when chose that color and so the people made everything pink.


We visited Palaces, Forts, Temples in Jaipur and we loved it. We wished so badly that we had skipped Varanasi and spent 2 days in Jaipur. Varanasi was just out of the way and not worth all the trouble it costs us. That's for sure. Our guide was good. Not as good as Nitin, but tons better than what's his name in Varanasi.































Near the palace in the old city was this cool area where an old astronomer made all these instruments to tell time and position of the sun. This is supposedly the largest sundial in the world! Pretty awesome.




And there were also instruments to tell what horoscope someone was when they are born. Horoscopes are important in India and the Hindu religion. This is the capricorn one!!


A Hindu temple in Jaipur. It was beautiful.






We loved visiting Jaipur. We felt like we got a lot done in the short time we were there, but wished we had a second day to see a little more.

We said goodbye to our last guide and got on the plane!


As for my opinion on doing a trip on your own or getting a guide. If I could do this trip over again, I would probably take more time to do more research before hand and then not get the guide. Myra and I just didn't have the time to research everything so getting a guide was the easy way to go. But if you have time to research and know what to see... You don't need one. Just get a driver (unless you have someone that can personally vouch for the guide and you make it clear to them you don't want to go to their dumb shops where they get 30% cut of your purchases). I travel a lot so I should have known better...but I just had too much going on before the trip. I mean, I didn't even buy all my plane tickets for the short jaunts in India until the week before we left!!!




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Location:Jaipur, India