Almost every tourist that comes to India travels to what is known as “The Golden Triangle” formed by the three cities: Delhi, Agra and Jaipur. These three cities have some of the most recognized and well-known architecture (like the Taj Mahal) and the oldest history in all of India (Delhi is also the capital of India).
As part of a cultural immersion experience, Harvard’s South Asia Institute (which funded our trip this summer and holds many events for students and alums both at Harvard and abroad) organized an immersion week for all the Harvard students in India this summer.
For the first leg of our trip, we flew into Jaipur and spent two days seeing some really incredible architecture and also seeing our friend Namrata who we knew from Ghungroo and whose family lives in Jaipur.
We were lucky enough to have Namrata show us around on the first day, visiting the City Palace, doing some shopping (and Namrata helping us bargain!), and visiting her home and eating some great food prepared by her mom!
Jaipur is known as the Pink City because all the buildings that are part of the old city are pink colored!
Later at night, we went to Chokhi Dhani, which is this cool tourist village that is made to resemble a real Rajasthani village but has lots of cool performances, music, games, food, and activities.
We got to ride an elephant and a camel at the village!
We had an awesome day with Namrata!
The next day, we visited some of the forts and palaces further away from the center of the city. There are so many cool forts and things in Jaipur but we unfortunately didn’t get to see all of them. The main one was Amer Fort which is a up on a hill and surrounded by really pretty mountains and lakes.
Around the fort, we saw some walls that were going up the mountain (we thought they looked like the Great Wall of China, so we just called it the Great Wall of India because we didn’t know the real name). Matt and I climbed up the wall and got a very cool view of Amer Fort and the surrounding area from the top!
On our way back to the city before we had to catch a bus to take us to Delhi, we also saw the Water Palace – a very cool old palace that was built on a huge lake!
After a great last lunch with Namrata in Jaipur, we (very hurriedly) dashed off to catch our 6 hour bus to Delhi.
Overall, I think Jaipur was one of my favorite cities that we visited in India so far. It has really cool architecture, is not extremely chaotic like many other large cities (or at least seems to have an order to the chaos), and has so much history. The only down side? Like all the other points of The Golden Triangle, it’s VERY HOT. Rajasthan definitely lives up to its reputation as a desert state!