The tour continues - 5th May

Hotel Umaid, Jaipur

This place is rather smart. The ceilings of the foyer, the bedroom, the dining room, the halls, plus the walls, are all decorated with a flower motif. Little friezes run everywhere and paintings and old photographs of a maharaja and his court, fill the spaces. There are drapes over windows and doors, and plush furnishings and objet d’art everywhere. Rather incongruously, the arm of the Victorian-style armchair in my room has been broken, and a repair affected with a thin strip of plywood and four staples. The room has a balcony, and lying on the bed looking up is a little like viewing the Sistine Chapel. Well, not much like really, but it is certainly a remarkable view.

Last of my brief tour today, and into Jaipur, the Pink City. There are some truly magnificent buildings both within and without the city. From the almost cool Winter Palace (Hawa Mahal) with its sloping ridged access to the top of the building, and slotted, patterned vents on all sides providing a continuous breeze, to the heat of the monolithic Jaigarh Fort/Amber Fort complex over looking the city from the Hill of Eagles, with defence walls running for miles up the sides of the hills and across their ridges. The fort really needs a couple days to appreciate properly, and it needs to be winter. All those films I’ve seen - like Ralph Richardson in The Four Feathers, stumbling along under a blistering sun. Well that was me.

Actually, I’m not one of nature’s tourists, certainly not the tick-box kind, and I found the tour relentless. There are only so many historical buildings you can absorb in two days, and I could happily have remained with the tigers. The tours include too many stops at selected warehouses and craft malls for my liking. You never get to browse in peace there; there’s always a voice at your elbow, the soft-shoe shuffle behind you as someone follows you wherever you go. I bought at the one place where the seller didn’t harass me, and told him that was why he’d made the sale.
Caveat emptor. Some hotels and tour operators are part of a network. Once in the hotel a friend, colleague, brother, can whip you off to the ‘tourist bureau’ and can have a tour organized for you in a flash. This is not a con – just a business. Everyone along the line must get a little tickle out of it, and I suspect the warehouse owners pay the tour operators for providing customers, maybe even a percentage if there’s a sale. Tours don’t have to be expensive - they’re tailored to your budget - sort of (see the blog on Hidden Extras) but I guess there’s cheaper ways to do it. The trouble is that the traveller doesn’t always know what he wants, or what there is to see, and isn’t given much time to think, so the tour often suits the operator. I won’t do another.

I haven’t had to say ‘no’ so much since my children were little, and then never so often. I met an Australian Indian lady on holiday with her family, and she was fed up with this constant aggravation in the land of her fathers – the insistence that you need a guide; that you must buy. Fluent in both Hindi and English, she had been both polite and rude in turn. Rude to the point where she had told sellers that she did not even like their goods so why on earth would she want to buy anything!
I have a good trick now. Shades. You can have a good look, but can avoid eye contact. And just say ‘no’. Forget ‘Thank you’ or any other pleasantry you may have learned at your mother’s knee.