Today we left Agra and headed to Jaipur, the 3rd city on our Golden Triangle Tour, the name of our tour, a popular route for tourists that includes Delhi the capital, Agra for the Taj Mahal, and Jaipur, known for its artisans and crafts. These cities form a triangle on the map; each leg of the drive is 4-6 hours. The cities host many of India's great cultural sites and varying landscapes.
Another one of my favorite pictures from the trip, again taken from the window of our car as we drove by. I love the authenticity. See the guy in the back cooking in that gigantic cast iron wok thing! And they're sitting on the dirt floor, piling up the freshly cooked bread on whatever flat surface happens to be nearby. And this is also why we never dared to eat street food while we were there. A little too authentic for our western stomachs.
If anyone wants to know, we were very fortunate not to have much stomach trouble while we were there. Our driver (for better or worse...we've concluded for better) always took us to overpriced restaurants that catered to Western tourists, meaning that they cooked with filtered water and were very sanitary. We tried to follow all the precautions in all the guidebooks (not eating any fresh produce that we hadn't washed and/or peeled ourselves, avoiding street food, even brushing our teeth with bottled water).
Interestingly, because of the time change, we were hungry at odd times (they are 10 1/2 hours ahead of Austin). We would wake up starving because it was "dinnertime", eat a substantial lunch, then often have just a protein bar or light snack for dinner because our stomachs thought it was the middle of the night and weren't hungry at all.
Another little traffic jam that we were in (and probably partially responsible for since most people didn't have cars as big as the one we were in...Honda Civic size, by the way).
Arrival at Fatepuhr Sikri, a historical city just outside of Agra.
The city was founded in 1569 by the Mughal emperor Akbar, and served as the capital of the Mughal Empire from 1571 to 1585. After a few conquests, he shifted the capital from Agra to here. Here he commenced the construction of a planned walled city which took the next fifteen years in planning and construction of a series royal palaces, harem, courts, a mosque, private quarters and other utility buildings. Fatehpur Sikri is one of the best preserved collection of Mughal architecture in India. He took great care in the design, trying to revive some Persian designs, but made it his own style because of the formality of the layout and using the easily available red sandstone. (wikipedia)
Our tour guide said this was a kind of safe. It just looks like a decorative niche in the wall, but you can actually stick your hand down into it to hide valuables.
A gigantic beehive nestled in with the restored painted ceiling.
Probably built for the ladies of the court.
The floors are supported by intricately carved columns on each level, totalling to 176 columns in all.
Diwan-i-Khas: the Diwan-i-Khas, or Hall of Private Audience, is a plain square building with four chhatris on the roof. However it is famous for its central pillar (shown here), which has a square base and an octagonal shaft, both carved with bands of geometric and floral designs, further its thirty-six serpentine brackets support a circular platform for Akbar, which is connected to each corner of the building on the first floor, by four stone walkways. It is here that Akbar had representatives of different religions discuss their faiths and gave private audience. (wikipedia)
The royal bed. Looks comfy, doesn't it?
Goodbye, Fatepuhr Sikri.
We drove for a few hours and stopped just before arriving in Jaipur. I thought the drives in between the cities would be boring, but it was a welcome rest from the aggressive sightseeing schedule we had planned. Our driver didn't speak much English, so there wasn't too much narrating the countryside for us. We would read or nap or make plans for the next stop.
We drove up some steep switchbacks and saw a different kind of rural India with crude shelters in the forests and people in rags cooking over campfires.
Our next stop is Galti Ji, just outside of Jaipur.
Galtaji is an ancient Hindu pilgrimage site in the town of Khaniya-Balaji Indian state of Rajasthan. The site consists of several temples and sacred kunds (water tanks) in which pilgrims bathe. Galtaji has been a retreat for Hindu ascetics since the early 1500s;[2] its present temple was built by Diwan Rao Kriparam, a courtier of Sawai Jai Singh II, in the 18th Century. The main temple is the Temple of Galtaji, built in pink stone. The temple features a number of pavilions with rounded roofs, carved pillars, and painted walls. The temple is famous for its natural water springs. which draw special attention of the visitors. The water of these springs is accumulated in the tanks (kunds). There are seven tanks, the holiest being the Galta Kund, which never goes dry. It is considered auspicious to take bath in the waters of Galtaji, especially on Makar Sankranti, and thousands come to bathe every year. (wikipedia)
We pulled up to this temple wedged in the valley of these craggy cliffs. Hello, terrorist hideout! This place was so creepy! I felt like I was standing in the news footage of the latest Taliban incident. It's called Galta Ji, or the Monkey Temple, and it wasn't hard to see why. It looks half abandoned, so the monkeys have moved in. This place is off the beaten path for tourists, although there was still an entrance fee and a chance to buy monkey food.
It was eerily empty except for a tourist here and there (and no white people). A guy in an orange sarong appeared out of nowhere (I think he might have been some sort of monk/caretaker/homeless person at the temple) and led us back to a even more deserted altar and started to give us a "tour", but we had caught on to this sort of thing by now and quickly escaped with a minimal donation.
Wild monkeys just chilling on the green.
I just couldn't get over the fact that zoo animals were just running around like squirrels. Crazy to me!
Of course, we bought a bag of peanuts to feed to the monkeys.
We had to play the tourist part in some respects.
Monkey perched on the little roof.
I thought this shot was so beautiful, all the colorful fabrics...this is what I was dreaming about before we got here. Is there any way I could pull off wearing a sari?
Random cow meandering along the second floor of the temple like he owned the place.
Another random cow passing us on the steps. They were so peaceful-looking, but we weren't sure what harm they were capable of or exactly what the protocol was for interacting with them.
This is from the top looking down back on the green where all the monkeys were. It was beautiful up here, and we could have kept hiking up further into more parts of the temple into the crags. Unfortunately, the eery feeling had still not lessened at all and the sun was setting, so we hightailed it out of there. Don't know what it was about this place...
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