Agra to Jaipur

Some time during our planning I had read that Jaipur wasn’t the vibrant place it was cracked up to be in the lonely planet and, thankfully, took heed of this, only booking one day there. We found the city quite unpleasantly busy. When I think about it, we probably weren't in the right frames of mind because of where we'd come from and all the travelling we'd been doing. In addition, I wasn't very well, and Liam was halfway through the third book in the Genghis Khan series so his kid was in Mongolia, not India.

One thing that has both amused and frustrated us is that the Indian answer to anything you don't know the answer to is ‘yes’. Often, language and communication are the issue but also, many men don't like to acknowledge that they don't know the answer. We had rickshaw driver in Jaipur that we were stuck with, who had a ‘yes’ for everything. He got upset at us when we tried to use our lonely planet guide, and told us we couldn’t buy or eat anything in half of the city because half the food for sale was processed and the goods made in China. I didnt point out to him that as far as I could tell, it sounded like we could be anywhere in India.

The highlight of the day was a morning lassi and walking up Amber fort where we came across a group of langurs. Watching groups of monkeys could keep me entertained for hours, but our interest in them seems most humorous to the locals. I suppose it's like watching tourists in New Zealand get excited about sheep.

Though the rickshaw driver did he best to try to convince us he could

show us the best shops around the ‘safe’ part of the city (no doubt for a whopping commission), by mid afternoon we decided to call it quits, looking forward to our next stop which promised to be much quieter and easy-going.