Oh man, it was amazing! It seemed like it would just be the higher fort where you could have some great views. Also it has the largest cannon in the world. However, it was SO much fun to explore and by far our favorite place in Jaipur.
And man, the views!
After walking around a bit (we declined to pay to drive us all the way up the fort, we can walk just fine!) we got up to the main part of the fort. First we went to some of the outer ramparts.
Hubby! :)
The ramparts were really nice but we wanted to see the big cannon! However, it was a rather hot day so while stopping for an ice cream bar I took this picture of part of the fort.
We had walked that entire thing actually...
So we get to the cannon and it's HUGE. They weren't exaggerating when they said that it's the largest. Here's a picture with the guard next to it.
Notice how tiny he is... this thing was super large. Unfortunately any pictures we took next to it made it look like it was a normal sized cannon from the distance we were from it.
After seeing the cannon, we went exploring near the restaurant place. Apparently on the other side was a whole other complex in which we could explore!!!!
Boy was it worth the extra walking. :)
The courtyard.
Archways (sorry it's crooked... the camera's calibration was off and I've been fixing pictures ever since I got home)
View of the valley. The fort and the reinforcements go all the way around the hills surrounding Jaipur. It was neat to see everything from the top.
Yay! We were there!
After exploring Jaigargh Fort, on that same ridge was Naigargh Palace. So we thought what the heck, we have a ticket that will get us into there (a combined student ticket for like 7 places... so worth the price), might as well go see it. Well, it was ok, but it was a little bit of a bust from the rest of the day. However, there were some cool things.
View of the palace courtyard
There were some pretty frescoes painted within this courtyard. However, the place was just an empty shell and nothing too terribly interesting.
One of the more detailed paintings
After seeing all of the forts we were going to go see the Monkey Temple! It was a little ways away and I totally passed out on Drew's lap. However, it was nice to wake up and we were there! Yay! No time lost. :P
It definitely was a monkey temple! It's in a town called Galta and it's main god is Hanuman, the monkey-god. Even though I saw a few people there bathing (it's a sacred place for some people) the monkeys far outnumbered the people.
This guy was like two feet away from me. I didn't get any closer because they can get nasty...
view of the temple complex from the top looking down.
Me in front of the main view of the temple.
The monkeys chilling in the building. That part of the temple is only accessible to the monkeys.
After such a long day (we left for Amber Fort at like 7 in the morning) we just went back to the hotel and had dinner there before crashing. We decided that since the next day we were going to just be in the city all day (we had a train to catch late at night the next night) we might as well sleep in and get our rest before the long and eventful train rides to the waay north.
So the next day, after relaxing and checking out at noon, we just left our stuff in the main lobby with the managers and went to explore a little more. We decided to use up our tickets that we had bought the previous day at Amber Fort and we went to the Jantar Mantar first. It was built in the 1500s and was a park built by the maharajahs for astrological calculations. It was a really neat park.
The big tower for the north star
Some smaller towers for calculating different constellations.
As fun as it was thought, we knew that it was a short stop and we weren't there more than half an hour. After that, since we were in downtown Jaipur, we decided to just walk to the Hawa Mahal. This was a really cool things for me. I had learned about the Hawa Mahal in my freshmen seminar class at Emory that was on the Harem in Indian and Middle Eastern cultures. The Hawa Mahal was something I had learned about because of how intricate the latticework was and how gorgeous it was.
It was rather fun to go see it, even if it was raining by the time we were exploring.
Back of the Hawa Mahal, where the ladies of the harem would have lived.
The front of the palace.
Since we just wanted to relax (having hiked ALL over various forts the day before) we decided to go to the Albert Hall Museum. It was free and close-ish to where we were staying. That was a really fun museum. It was my first Indian Museum and it was fun to see what they placed importance on. One of the more interesting exhibits was a collection of weapons. Some of them were rather creative. It was also fun to see the different gods and their poses.
pretty courtyard of the museum
View of one of the towers of the museum.
Getting back to our hotel was a bit of a challenge. I had forgotten my piece of paper that had all of our important details listed (hotel addresses, phone numbers etc) in my bookbag... at the hotel. The problem was that the Albert Hall Museum wasn't the biggest tourist location and as such people couldn't think of where our hotel was. So we ended up going on the complete other side of the city with someone before getting out, walking a bit and finally finding someone who knew where we were going. The frustrating thing was arguing for prices. But the problem was that by the time we found someone who knew where we were going, we needed to get back to the hotel to make sure we could get to the train station on time. Yeah... not fun. But we made it to the train station and got onto our train to Amritsar.
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