Two days in Jaipur, and a kachori for breakfast

Two days is not enough, and we did it anyway

Jaipur was the opposite of the trek. No packing list, no briefing, no gear check. Two of us, a weekend, and a city that has more to look at than a weekend can hold.

We went in anyway, on the theory that a short trip you actually take beats a long one you keep planning.

Breakfast first, obviously

The correct way to start a day in Jaipur is a plate of pyaaz kachori and a kulhad of chai, standing on the street, slightly too early for the heat.

The kachori is enormous, it is fried, it is filled with spiced onion, and it is not the sort of thing anyone should eat first thing in the morning. We ate it first thing in the morning.

Then the walking started, and did not really stop.

Hawa Mahal

You come around the corner and it is just there, on a normal road, with traffic going past like it is a bus stop.

That is the thing about the old city. These buildings are not set back behind gates and lawns. They are part of the street, and people walk past them on their way to work.

Nine hundred and fifty something windows, built so the women of the court could watch the street without the street watching back. It is the most photographed wall in Rajasthan and it still does not get boring.

We took the obligatory photo. Everybody does.

Jantar Mantar, where the maths is the building

This is the one I did not expect to like as much as I did.

Jantar Mantar is a park full of enormous stone instruments built in the 1730s to measure the sky. Not models of instruments. The instruments. The sundial here is the largest in the world and it is accurate to about two seconds, which is a genuinely absurd sentence to write about a pile of stone from three hundred years ago.

You walk between them and slowly work out that each shape is doing a job. The curved ones track a specific thing in the sky. The staircase going up at a strange angle is pointed at the pole star.

It is a maths textbook you can walk around inside, and it is my favourite thing in Jaipur.

Panna Meena ka Kund

Then, the stepwell.

Panna Meena ka Kund is a square well with staircases running down all four sides in a criss cross pattern, and photographs of it do not prepare you for how deep it actually is. It was built so the town could reach the water as the level dropped through the year, which means the whole thing is a piece of infrastructure that happens to look like that.

It sits just below Amber, away from the main road, and it is quieter than everywhere else we went that day.

Amber Fort

Up the hill after that, into Amber.

Amber is less a fort than a small town with walls, courtyard opening into courtyard, each one hotter and quieter than the last.

And then the Sheesh Mahal, which is a room lined with thousands of small mirrors, built so that a few candles would light the whole thing. That was the pitch, anyway. Standing in it, I believe it.

The lake, and then the light went

Man Sagar on the way back, with Jal Mahal sitting in the middle of it looking like somebody dropped a palace in a lake and never explained why.

Dinner was a thali, because you cannot come to Rajasthan and order anything else with a straight face. Dal, kadhi, sabzi, something sweet, and more roti than any reasonable person needs.

Then up to the ridge above the city for the end of the day. The whole of Jaipur goes flat and pink and slightly hazy from up there, and the sun does the thing it does.

What I would do differently

Two days is enough to see Jaipur. It is not enough to sit in it, which is the part I actually wanted.

If I went again I would keep the same list and cut it in half. One fort, not three. A long breakfast instead of a fast one. More time at Jantar Mantar, because that is where I kept wanting to stay.

The kachori, though, I would do exactly the same. Twice, probably.