Architectural marvels, modern and ancient - Jaipur

This is the last of the series of posts on our Jaipur trip from summer!

In our last 24 hours in Jaipur we covered the Jantar Mantar, a Radhe Shyam temple, Birla Mandir and in the morning we covered the Hawa Mahal (air palace). We also managed to get stuck in a heavy downpour and photograph the Jal Mahal (water palace) in the evening!

The previous post on this series of visits is here.

We left Abaneri in the afternoon and came back to Jaipur city to see the Jantar Mantar. Another place that you do not want to visit on a hot and sultry afternoon. It was about to rain and rain big. Walking through those giant "astro-reader" implements was like being in a Hot Yoga room. If you are a big fan of astronomy, this place is a must see. They have precise instrumentation that tells you the position of everything related to everything else in space and time! That pretty much sums up the place.

I am not into astronomy. It is one of those things that I don't grasp easily. This thing in a marble hemisphere with lines around it tracked every planet and constellations position very precisely. It made my head spin!

After walking through all these "Yantras", we walked through the lawns. This little bird was shouting at me. Given I intended it no harm and was tired and weary, took another look at it to see "what its problem was". Turned out it had 4 legs!

After realizing I was no threat, she got up as though smiling at me and walked around. This beautiful chick came out and posed for me! That made my day...

Later on we visited two temples.. one was a Radhe-Shyam temple built in the 1600's by the King of Jaipur and another was the marble temple made by Birla.

It had also finished raining and we went through quite an ordeal getting back into level ground after that downpour. Jaipur's drainage system is probably one of the worst in the world. We were lucky to be in a van instead of a car. 

Cars were literally floating away in the flooding waters at one point near the Jal Mahal. The fresh rain did make the Jal Mahal stand out. If we make another trip to this place, we will definitely take the boat ride to this palace and see inside. Unfortunately, the boat rides are stopped during heavy rains. 

and here is a HDR version.

We were so tired that I did not get my camera out to take pictures at the Birla mandir. A cell phone photo is all we got.. guessing I have very few Birla mandirs left to cover in India!

On the last half day, we visited the Hawa Mahal with a tour guide who went over the kings and queens story yet another time.

This place is a true architectural marvel. It has 900+ windows on the wall facing the street. It has seven levels built staggered so that the foundation can handle it. How may other such massive seven storied structures existed 400 years ago? All the colored glass was imported from Belgium.. or so says the tour guide!

The views from this palace are all designed so that the many queens can watch the king and his processing come from the other place to this one from very far away. Have tried to capture some of those view points in the photographs below..

 The street we see now is where the processing used to come from..

You can see the Jantar Mantar from the top level of the Hawa Mahal and realize how big some of these structures are.. 

A view of the pink city from the top of the Hawa Mahal.

The air flow in this palace was amazing. The 900 windows are placed perfectly to usher in a wind gust that keeps the palace air conditioned 24/7. Here is the Hawa Mahal from street level on the outside. 

Here is an inside view..

Belgian glass takes care of light.. Marble and windows take care of the air circulation. Awe inspiring design!

A view of the courtyards inside. Dancing and entertainment was watched by the many queens through the windows. You can see the slats in the windows are all angled towards the courtyard. The queens can see the center but they cannot be seen. Again, ingenious design!

Even the passages and corridors were curved and lined with cool marble to circulate the air in such a way to create a cooling effect. They should show the Hawa Mahal as a case study for architecture students across the globe. 

After spending the morning at the Hawa Mahal, it was time to say bye to the Pink City!

I had to fly into the domestic airport in Mumbai from Jaipur and within 3 hours go to my in-laws place, grab suitcases and get back to the International airport to travel to east asia, for a business trip! 

Do not know if I should thank Cathay Pacific for their cancelling the flight. For one, I did not get on a plane that had engine failure. I got to spend 3 more days with my family, even if for a few hours each day and had to work during the night and sleep during rides. It also gave me a chance to calm down and get my nerves in order after that ordeal on the plane. 

A good two months later, they did refund that cancelled trip and give me a coupon for the phone bill (from all the calls I had to make from the plane to rearrange things)!

It has taken a long time to get the photos, videos etc. on to the travelog, but that seems to be the norm these days with the busy work schedule. Seriously thinking of buying a personal laptop and installing the Photo editing software on it. Can come in handy during long flights!

Here is to the next trip, to a location we have not seen before!

Living it up - Maharajah style

Previous post on our sighteeing marathon in Jaipur is here.. 

We had already visited 2 forts and it was close to noon when we decided to go visit the Amer (Amber) Fort / Palace.

This palace was something else compared to the previous two. The entrance and courtyards were the size of football fields!

What kind of place, has man hole covers with hand made art work?

Turkish baths with walls that have the equivalent of filigree work on marble?

A temple that is still acccessed only by the royal family to date? A Ganesha idol the size of a basketball made out of a single piece of Coral (no photography allowed.. costs a few million bucks and is in plain sight on the temple roof!) ? and the list goes on and on.. and yes, a separate palace quarters for the queens.. all few hundred of them!

Here are some pictures (mostly HDR)...

you just stand there and go "Wow!" 

Still learning how to adjust barrelling effect on the 17-44mm shots at 17mm. Will figure it out soon.

You go inside and it gets better..

The halls are cool and somehow in 110 F heat, you feel air conditioning thanks to the architecture!

Then there was the highlight, the "Sheesh Mahal" or Glass house. The walls and ceilings had a million glass pieces in them and they lit up the area. 

The grandeur of the whole place is something we have not seen anywhere before. Even the Taj kind of takes second place to this monstrosity. 

They constructed a floating garden to get special spices and herbs. Apparently they found out the hard way that it is difficult to grow Saffron in Jaipur. Given all the other advancements they had, it was an odd fact that the guide threw at us.

A close up of this garden..

We walked past turkish baths with elaborate hot water piping and decor walls to reach a roof garden.

You get great views of the city and the other forts from here as well.

Then there was the queens quarters!

Every queen had 2 bedrooms, a living room and a kitchen. No attached baths apparently. That concept was not there in those days. They all had a common bathroom, which had a nice faucet system for sanitation. It was "interesting" engineering.

Given how the rest of the area was maintined, the queens quarters was definitely not taken care of. The area had an abandoned feel to it, but one can imagine what it would have looked like 400 years ago given their taste in art and marble. The government should restore this area of the palace. 

We finally came out of the palace and took more photographs of the palace from the road. 

and we were tired with a capital T! Our guide told us to check out a restaurant called Zeeman for Vegetarian food and we went there for a late lunch. 

The food was mouth watering. Naan that just melted in your mouth. Every dish was a delight. If you are vegetarian and you want to have a great meal after a long day of roaming around palaces the size of football fields, you cannot go wrong with this place!

We went back to our hotel rooms and came back to pink city to see a few more places and have dinner at Dasaprakash. It was good food but a let down, after that wonderful lunch at Zeeman!

We visited a few more places on the next day and a half. Those posts will have to wait. 

Sightseeing Marathon - The forts of Jaipur

The last post on Jaipur trip is linked here...

Day 3 of our trip was entirely spent close to Jaipur City. We saw so many sights and I took so many photographs for one day that this day's events have to be broken into two parts. 

We started early in the morning and went to see the Jal Mahal (Water palace). It was nice, given we were not allowed to go to it on the boat. We took a few "profile pictures" and moved on to go up the mountain range to see the first of three forts around Jaipur. 

Camels greeted us in the roadsides

The place had hundreds of dressed up camels that were used by the locals as transportation, be it pulling carts or as vehicles themselves. Cows: Banaras :: Camels : Jaipur, when it comes to animals mingling with traffic on roads.

The Jal Mahal was not picture perfect in the morning given the bland background and backlighting. So we planned to get back to it on another day or hope for better shots in the evening.

The views of the city were great as we moved up towards Jaigarh fort.

The fort had an impressive water tank that made it secure with respect to its water needs.  The entire thing had walls with slotted windows where marksmen would line up to shoot intruders, or so we were told by our guide.

The fort also is home to the worlds largest cannon!

Four elephants were requried to manouver the cannon and given that only one test shot was fired and that was enough to scare everyone away, this might have been a precursor to atomic bomb testing when it came to the logic of "lets just show everyone how scary this is and no one will dare attack us".. a logic that goes bad pretty quickly as someone else comes up with a different weapon in a few hundred years!

The walls of this fort run through the perimeter of the hills. Very impressive given it was built almost 400 years ago for a place that did not have any threats at the time it was built.

We wandered around the fort walls and turrets and got to see the valley views.

Right now the fort is home to a few tens of thousands of pidgeons! They were everywhere.

The views from the walls was just amazing!

After seeing this fort we went to see another fort, the Nahargarh fort. Nahar apparently means Tiger, but that had nothing to do with the naming as there was some backstory to this fort. It was pitched to us as a fort which was to keep the queens secure in times of war. 

This one had really impressive views of the entire Jaipur City as well as the valley below. The queens had it made, as long as their king was alive. If he died, they were either burnt alive with his body or had to go queen with the new king. Not so great, as far as options went. It was not like they could get a pension and live their life. 

The entrance was impressive once we got to the top of the mountain. 

The bikes provided a much needed time warp for this picture!

You walk into a courtyard and there are rooms for the queens on either side. There were way too many queens for one king and the kids were like "What the hell? I want to see who this idiot was who thought he could manage that many women!" 

We got to walk through three floors of the palace all the way to the rooftop to get a view of the City! Guess that if you are a king and you can do whatever you want with taxpayer $ or Rupees or whatever the hell currency he had, you get to build things like this! 

Every square inch of the surface was a work of art! This forting business must have been good for the local economy, employment etc. Maybe that was one reason for building these things, much like how we build unncessary Tanks and Military equipment that no one is asking for in places where there are no other jobs.

After catching a view of Jaipur city from every side, we started driving down to the Amer (Amber) Palace or Fort. They mixed it up w.r.t. calling it Amer or Amber and Fort or Palace. Guess it was both.  By the time we reached level ground, we were hungry. Our tour guide suggested we eat first and then see the Amer palace, but we wanted to finish off everything one shot. 

What we saw at the Amer fort was nothing short of spectacular. That will be part 2 of this post..

I really wanted to finish the Jaipur travelog before August and the Golu season, but there are still a few hundred photos to edit. The international travel disrupts posting. Will have to figure out a way to get VPN going so I can edit posts from hotel rooms in Asia. 

Another day, another post. On the plus side, it is good to be back in the US with the wife and kids again!

Luck, Chance or divine intervention - A trip to Jaipur

My vacation in India was supposed to be two weeks, including the 4th of July holiday. San and the kids were to spend another 2 weeks while I was to experiment alone in the Kitchen and go back to Asia for a business trip in those two weeks. My stay in India extended by an extra four days, and I got a chance to spend those four days with the family on a Jaipur trip. The way it happened was scary though.

My FIL had dropped me off at Mumbai airport for a Cathay Flight to Hongkong. Being my first time at the new airport, was happy snapping pictures of the airport and was in general looking forward to a great trip. It was a full flight and just as we were cleared for take off and the plane was about to go around the bend to start take off, the plane made the usual funny noises. The pilot however, announced that he was aborting take off and instead was going to cross over to the other side of the airport and get it checked by Engineering. His exact words were "this is most likely to be a 10 or 30 minute delay".

There we were on the outskirts of the airport with twenty or so vehicles of different sizes flashing cop lights everywhere. We did not know if it was really an engineering problem or something else. One hour goes by, we are all asked to remain seated, not get up, no water, no tray table lowering and no updates. Slowly the passengers who woke up and realized they are still on the plane started demanding updates. The updates were few and far between and finally 4 hours and 45 minutes after sitting on a plane that was supposed to fly for 5 hours 30 minutes,  the passengers started a mutiny of sorts. 

It was my most ridiculous experience on a plane to date. Finally the pilot said "we are aborting this flight" but we cannot go back to the airport in the plane. You will be taken in buses 50 at a time. The only good thing was that the passengers in first class allowed the elders and people with kids to go out first. 

Once we got back to the airport, it became even more ridiculous. The ground staff, which was mostly new college grads in Cathay uniforms were clearly not ready to handle 400+ irate and tired passengers at 6AM and to top things off we had to get a "cancel" stamp on our passports to Re-enter India! Then we had to get our baggage back and go through "customs". Fortunately they created a separate line for this aborted flight and let us out fast. Now this little "cancel" stamp is making every immigration officer look me up and down (I have already made it back to Asia twice since July)!

When my FIL picked me up back at the airport at 7AM, the logistics of this hit me. They were leaving at 11 AM to Jaipur. I had to stay alone in Mumbai for 2 days, then fly back and forth across the Pacific within 3 days. So alternate arrangements were made in 2 hours. I got Wifi ready to work from Jaipur over the next 4 nights and got a last minute ticket to fly with them and fly out of India 4 hours after we land back in Mumbai. It was sight seeing by day and work by night and was brutal, but we were all happy. The photographer was now part of the trip!

I was also over joyed at seeing San and the kids and have never hugged them tighter. Turns out the plane had engine failure and it was a good thing the pilot aborted the flight! 

Off we went to Jaipur and boy was it great! My FIL always does an outstanding job of planning a trip months in advance. He had to adjust on the fly and cancel a trip to Bikaner given my work schedule, but we managed to cover things in Jaipur at a steady pace over 4 days.

The ITC Rajputana, where we stayed was amazing. Just look at the lobby! Had to do HDR images to just capture a fraction of what our eyes saw there. 

The kids were running up and down the marble stair cases. To date we have not been in a more beautiful hotel.

Then we went to the room. It had a great view of the pool and there were folks going through a Yoga class in the lawn. 

Even the hallway props in this hotel were awesome!

After relaxing for an hour, we visited the City palace of Jaipur. As soon as we entered the palace, we were greeted by a snake charmer. These guys know how to play to the stereotype!

There was a puppet show which included "Michael Jackson" which amused Jr. and the little one. I will reiterate.. they know how to play to stereotypes..

The Palace was full of weaponry from the 1700's and the gifts that the kings had received from various places over the years. 

 The halls were magnificent. I just went click crazy.. 

We used a tour guide who gave us a decent explanation for every thing we saw. This palace has multiple levels above and below the ground level. An engineering marvel if you realize they had a 10+ story building 350+ years ago.

My mind kept going to the same thought. These guys created so many wonderful things hundreds of years ago. What have we done since then other than figure out how to destroy them or disrespect them? and I did not think of this in an Indian context but a global context. Eisenhower created a fantastic highway system in the fifties and today there is not enough money to even maintain those, let alone reinvent. 

When it comes to creating architecture, we suck compared to our previous generations. It is all glass, concrete and steel. The artistry seems to have taken a backseat and chances are all these glass thingys wont last 350 years. 

This palace had 4 gates which were so ornate, one for each season. Apparently the king used to use the entrance for that season. 

Waited patiently at this gate for the two guys to leave, but no luck. They insisted on being part of the shot. 

 The stone work in the palace was mind boggling. 

as were the doors with all the metal work. This is one huge door to enter the palace!

Just look at this one pillar. I asked the guide how long it took to complete the palace and he said "one kings starts it and his grandson finishes it".. most palaces in the area were completed over almost a hundred years.

There were a few intersting artifacts in the Palace that caught our attention. One was this mirror gifted to the King from the Chinese. No matter where you stood, you could get a full length reflection. 

and what was the worlds largest silver pot! This thing made it to UK and back because the King would only drink and bathe in water from the Ganges. So he made two large silver pots, filled them with Ganga water and hauled it in a ship for his UK tour. 

The palace also had a big hall where all the artists who were patronized by the king for generations demonstrated their art form. The kids thoroughly enjoyed spending an hour watching the artist paint minute details with vegetable colors on silk. 

After spending a good two hours at the palace, we were off to have a traditional Rajasthani dinner.

Would definitely recommend the ITC Rajputana hotel for a stay if you can manage one of those dicount deals.

That is a post for another day...

Tall trees tell many tales

The redwood forests are amazing. 

Here are some pictures from the trails along Avenue of the Giants!

Our sincere hope is that the last of the original forests in our Northwest don't die because stupid politics and the interests of a select few trump what we leave for our future generations.