Asia-Europe 2012

At this moment we learned that the Pakistan visa will be ready in an unspecified amount of time, which could exceed our limit. Being optimistic, we decided to go North towards Kashmir and hope by the time we are done visa will be ready. If not, there is a problem.

Since two unconnected but knowledgeable persons advised us never to ship to/from India (or else face problems that would dwarf the issue I had with the guys in Los Angeles – with whom I am having a lawsuit right now btw 🙂 ) we shall head back to Nepal and ship the bike to Romania from there.

Just North of the city there are 3 forts. The main attraction is the Amer Fort, built in the XVI-XVIII centuries. This fort is well preserved and quite large, featuring living quarters for the Maharajah, his family and the attendants, fortifications, temples and even an elephant stable. It took us half a day to explore all corridors, narrow passes and towers.

This could have easily been a fascinating place to relax, similar to Hoi An (1, 2), if it wouldn’t be for the omnipresent trash, stinking streets, beggars and homeless people.

The so-called City Palace is a compound built in the XVIII century and used until 1949 as a residence for the Jaipur Maharajahs. We could see several rooms, a collection of arms and one of costumes. One unusual building is the Hawa Mahal, a building that hosted mainly women. It had small windows so that the women could see outside while not being seen back.

Last two pictures show Jantal Mantal, a collection of 14 astronomical instruments built in the XVIII century of stone. They show the time, phase of moon, predict eclipses and so on. I was able to understand how two of them work 🙂

En route from Agra to Jaipur we stopped to visit Akbar’s Mausoleum (built in XVII century), the Mughal who built also the Agra Fort.

After that we had the chance to see a structure we haven’t seen ever before: the Chand Baori deep well designed to catch rain water during the monsoon season. Later, it was used for consumption and washing. The rooms you see inside the well are the changing and bathing rooms. Left side was for men and right for women.