By the time Richard and I returned to Jaipur, we felt like we were different people, exploring a different country to the one we had so recently arrived in. Yet nothing had really changed; there was still the same sense of decay and nondescript danger as there had been in Delhi, and we still suffered from the same anxieties. In the evening, after dining alone in the hotel's restaurant, we looked through Richard's Lonely Planet guide, contemplating our future. "It says here," I said, "that it isn't recommended that you head into Bihar without an armed escort. Richard, we were planning on going to Bodhgaya by train, and that's in Bihar!" The statements we read about where we'd been and where we were going, or would have gone had our plans not changed, were so extreme that by the second paragraph we were laughing so hard as to almost cry.
Jaipur, capital of Rajasthan, is popularly known as the "Pink City," for the decorative use of pink stucco in its architecture. It was founded by the warrior-scholar Jai Singh II, who was admired equally for his leadership on the battlefield as for his learned background. The picture above is from Jantar Mantar, the Maharaja's observatory. Jai Singh II sent his scholars around the world to investigate astronomy and bring back new techniques and ideas; after years of experimentation with brass instruments and glass optics, Jai decided that his environment was not hospitable to European methods, and he set about constructing a stone and marble observatory. The results are spectacular, and for both Richard and I, one of the true highlights of our tour, since neither of us had seen anything like it anywhere before.
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