I am wearing colourful, billowy swathes of lightweight fabric which are flying out of the auto-rickshaw I’m travelling in at a perilously fast speed through chaotic, noisy traffic. I may look bohemian and laid back, with an orange paint dot on my forehead, but I’m hanging on for dear life, awake in the fullest sense and feeling like a character in a dramatic video game whose demise would be inevitable were I not invincible.
Go to Jaipur if you want to:
have an entire wardrobe of bespoke clothes made in a matter of days;
immerse yourself in colour and life;
explore your hidden bohemian;
have your personality and future read by a guru/psychic, especially if you saw the guru in BBC’s The Real Marigold Hotel;
have exhilarating auto-rickshaw rides;
experience the world of The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel or even stay there;
see mountains from the city;
experience a sense of old Rajasthan/India;
watch a polo match (limited season but they do practise/exercise);
buy jewellery, pottery, fabric, leather, rugs;
feel like royalty by taking a turn around the grounds and indoor (1930s “wow!”) and outdoor pools of Taj Jai Mahal Palace, a spectacular, genuinely palatial hotel (or stay there if you have a very generous budget);
be wowed by ornate, old architecture;
travel in monsoon season (they don’t get as much rain as many Indian tourist cities);
be driven around/escorted/looked after by the best, most charismatic auto-rickshaw driver/guide* possible;
sit on a beautiful step well, surrounded by extraordinarily old buildings, merely the occasional off-the-beaten-track tourist and local and experience a sense of tranquility.
Don’t go to Jaipur if you:
want to see pink buildings (it’s being repainted in a cheaper colour, salmony terracotta);
are not assertive (emphasis is on shopping and bargaining and negotiating with auto-rickshaw drivers);
don’t want to see elephants and camels around the streets being used for tourist purposes;
want to visit tourist locations from the same base over a stay longer than four days (the tourist sites are in clusters, easy to visit each cluster in a day, and you can get mausoleumed/shopped/forted/historied out);
expect there to be less poverty than other touristy cities (girl child poverty is particularly bad, statistics and my experience confirm);
have no interest in history (it’s staring you in the face wherever you go);
want to be impressed by an island lake palace (you can currently only view it from the filthy lake shore);
are horrified by the thought of a heightened likelihood of having a bindi (or similar) applied to your forehead (even though it’s lucky);
want to quietly go about your sightseeing without being hassled by auto-rickshaw drivers, guides, desperately poor adults and children and sellers of all sorts;
feel that these negatives outweigh the positives (it is on one hand a very special, magical city, but the other hand has more of an impact than, in my experience, Mumbai and Delhi);
are likely to be upset at being ripped off as a tourist.
*the best, most trustworthy, reliable, excellent English-speaking, internationally culturally-aware, savvy auto-rickshaw driver and guide is surely Sheikh Musharef (mobile and WhatsApp +91 9829922314)
PHOTO The Sheikh, Sheikh Musharef, auto-rickshaw driver extraordinaire