Jacqui and Richard Abroad: Wednesday, November 26th

Here we go: a 4 day weekend! Weleft our apartment late Tuesday night to catch a 1:30 am flight to Jaipur (pop. 4 million), India. The flight is 2½ hour long and the time difference is 1½ hours ahead of us, which meant that we landed at about 5:30 am. We had made arrangements with the hotel to have someone pick us up at the airport. What a relief to see someone holding a little sign with our name on it after spending a sleepless night on a plane. We got to the hotel and checked in at 6:30am! We've checked in many hotels before but never at that time. To our great pleasure and surprise, they had a room ready for us. We slept for about 3 hours then went for a 30 minutes massage, which was included in our hotel package. We had lunch, then went out for our first tour of the weekend. We had booked a driver, who took us all over the place in the 3 days that we were there. Our first stop was the City Palace, located in the Pink City (named after the color of most of its walls). It was built in the early 1700 by the Maharaja and is made up of various palaces, gardens and temples. It was pretty cool to see.

One thing that was amazing on the way there was the traffic, and the people. Their road system isn't as developped as ours, so that there are few street lights at intersections. It's mostly whoever honks the loudest and longest that will go through. So you go from a two or three lane street to about 5 cars (or vehicules) wide as it can include tractors pulling trailers - the real definition of a tractor trailer, motorcycles, scooters, tuk tuks, cyclists, horses pulling carts, elephants pulling carts, camels pulling carts, pedestrians trying to cross the street, and of course, cows! It's a real adventure. You have people going every which way at the same time, plus they drive on the left hand side of the road. There is no way that I would drive there, not a chance! But there are no accidents!

At night, we went out for dinner to a pretty cool place, at the Choki Dhani Resort. It's a five-star resort, build to entertain adults and children. There were various shows, elephant rides, and a real nice Indian buffet for dinner. We walked around a bit, had dinner, walked around a bit more then went back to meet our driver, as fatigue was quickly settling in. It had been a really nice first day in India.

Tomorrow, Agra and the Taj Mahal! Can't wait!