Jaipur, Rajasthan (The Pink City)

We started our tour of Rajasthan in Jaipur - the pink city. The city gets its name from the pink color the city was painted in 1876 to welcome a prince from Britain. The idea stuck and the old city walls and buildings are still painted pink to this day.

In the center of Jaipur is the City Palace, which has been partially turned into a museum where you can see how the Maharaja lived in days gone by. The current Maharaja still lives in a more modern section of the palace, but it's off limits to visitors unless you pay an exorbitant entrance fee for a private tour. (The current Maharaja was crowned only two months ago after the death of his father and he's only fourteen years old.) The palace has some nice exhibits of clothes, weapons, palanquins and other royal paraphernalia. The architecture isn't bad either. Oh yeah, and it's pink of course.

The city highlight for us though was Jantar Mantar, a fascinating observatory started by the Maharaja in 1728 and still in exceptional condition. The site has numerous gigantic contraptions for measuring time and the position of the stars. The most impressive is a sundial with a 27m / 89ft gnomon. To give an impression of the size, Jo is barely visible standing at its base in the last picture.

We also visited the Hawa Mahal, a distinctive five story building in the heart of the city which was built specifically so the ladies of the royal household could view life in the city. Due to "purdah" rules, all the windows of the building have delicate marble screens, shutters, or coloured glass windows so the ladies could see out but no one could see in. Despite what the guidebooks say, the building itself isn't that impressive, but it does offer great views back to the Royal Palace, Jantar Mahal, and one of the main market streets.

For more good views, we headed just outside the city walls to a temple on a hill called the "Monkey Temple" due to the fact that thousands of monkeys supposedly live around it. We didn't see "thousands," but there were a few lounging around.

We'd heard from a lot of people that Jaipur is a fantastic place to visit. Perhaps we missed something, but our experience was not that enjoyable. Jaipur, as the capital of Rajasthan, is extremely busy. It's also a main stop on the "Golden Triangle" tourist route (along with Delhi and Agra) so has its fair share of common frustrations like scams, touts, and unrealistically inflated prices. Nothing we saw in Jaipur made putting up with the hassle worthwhile. If anyone can explain what is supposedly so great about Jaipur, please let us know in the comments. We're curious.