If it moves, and has some empty horizontal surface, it must be public transportation. 

...and one last picture on the same subject... 

I met this master of disguise on the way from Agra to Jaipur. 

These couple of elephants are on their way to work, shipping turists up to the fort (more on that later). As all other domestic animals, elephants are quite adept at sharing the road with cars, bikes and pedestrians. 

I started the last day of my trip with Amer, a very unique fort/palace. 

This is the view from the top of the fort. You can also see the wall surrounding the city, running along the ridgeline of neighboring hills. 

This is the Ganesh Gate, the entrance to the Raja's private quarters. He watched the beginning of the town meetings from the top floor of this facade, with his wives. The stone meshwork is designed to cover the ladies faces. The paints used for the decoration are based on powdered precious stones, so they haven't faded one bit since the 16th century defying the hot Indian sun.

On of the specialities of Amer fort is the mirror inlay work in several rooms. They provided decoration, as well as natural room-lighting. Although the picture doesn't show it clearly, each little piece of the decoration is made from mirrors. 

Looking down at the Amer for gardens... 

The touristy way to get up to Amer fort is to take an elephant ride. Local authorities have recently restricted the elephant traffic to only the first couple of hours of the day, and they limited the number of people each elephant can carry. We got there a bit late, and the line was ridiculously long -- so I decided to hike up instead of taking the elephant (to the great disapproval of my guide, who didn't seem to be in the best of shapes :)). It was an eye opening experience to walk the narrow road with elephants on either side. Steel-toed safety shoes may have been a good idea.

I saw this unusual example of optical tuning right outside Amer fort. It adds some really fun, eastern color to the western-looking Swift. 

Hawa Mahal - The king built this 5 storey building for his wives (one floor for each), so they could observe the city life and bazaar without being seen by the commoners. 

This device is an astrological clock, used to determine the fate of newborns, as well as to plan the timing of military excursions. To make maintenance and educational work easier, there are stairs and corridors to gain close access to each slice. To compensate for the "blank" areas, they built two of these spheres, with a complementary slice pattern. The shadow of a small rectangle (suspended on wires above) on the second slice from the bottom indicates the current time.

Here are some pictures of the Jaipur Jantar Mantar. As I mentioned above, this observatory is almost completely functional. I took this picture from the top of the biggest sundial -- a 30 m tall replica of the triangular building on the left of the picture.

Here are some more small sundials, used to finetune the astrological data (there is an individual dial for each sign).

No Indian collection can be complete without a picture of a snake charmer.

This is the City Palace, the home of the Royal Family of Jaipur. The current heir still lives in the Palace, which also houses a few small museums, and a market/exhibition hall for select artists.

The previous Maharaja would only consume holy water from the Ganges. He used this silver(!) pot to provide continuous supply of holy water while he was abroad.

India, week 2



For my second weekend I went on a safari in Nagarhole National Park (which is about 5 hours of driving from Bangalore, 4 the way my driver did it). The best spot for this kind of activity is the Kabini resort, which was booked for 2 months in advance. So I had to settle for a lot more expensive and a little less ideally located competitor.

The resort was beautiful with nice private cottages (above) and a big pool (below). They took us on two outings, one on Satuday afternoon until sunset, and one Sunday morning around sunrise (we started at 5 a.m., which was a bit early for my taste). I ended up sharing a driver with an Israeli couple, and -- of all people -- a PACS developer from Philips Medical.

If you survive the experience of speeding through a horrible dirt road sitting on the bed of a tiny jeep-type vehicle (made by Maruti for small people), you are rewarded by a close look at a wide selection of animals in their natural habitat. Due to the shaky vehicle, and the driver's good old fashioned common sense of not approaching hungry or angry animals, I didn't get to take a decent picture of everything I saw. Most notably all of my elephant pictures came out blurry, and I didn't even try to take pictures of wild dogs, a tiger (which was about 10 meters away but rapidly proceeded to chase a smaller animal than us), peacocks, crocodiles and a bunch of very colorful but also very alert birds.

The one thing the park has ample of is Spotted Deer (AKA tiger food).

Some of my more successful photographic attempts include this Crested Serpent Eagle...

...a snake...

...this Hoopoe bird that we almost ran over...

...a Gaur...