JIPP TRAVELS

Being literally unknown to me at least until I came to India, Jaipur turned out to be such a pleasant surprise. IT had really taught me how there was much more of India then just a land of over sized mausoleums and centuries-old palaces and probably expansive slum areas as portrayed in the Slum Dog Millionaire.

So – After staying overnight in Agra, it was time to bid farewell to the beautiful Taj Mahal. It felt so good to finally tick something off the list of Seven Wonders of The World. 🙂We were so glad we followed our instinct by going there during the sunset instead of waiting until the next morning to catch it at the sunrise. The idea of taking a picture of me looking so girlish with an umbrella in my hand and the Taj Mahal hardly seen under the dark and gloomy sky of Agra was already so scary to even contemplate. It’s not like I get to go there every year or something.You see, you have every reason not swallow every info that people feed you with when you’re traveling because there’s no way of telling whether they are really sure of what they are saying or not. The hotel owner had been so assuring when he told us that there is a bus leaving for Jaipur EVERY hour of the day and that MOST of them are air-conditioned.We arrived at the bus station (at a very un-Indian name for a hotel called Sakura Hotel) just in time to catch a bus that leaves for Jaipur at 7.30 am SHARP. The guy at the counter told us that the next bus would only be leaving at 12.30pm and that we might have to wait until 2.30 pm if we wanted to catch one with air-condition. Since there was nothing more for us to stay in Agra for, we decided to just get on the bus and let our sense of adventure took charge.

“I am telling you the truth. I am the owner of the hotel so I want to help my guests. I don’t want them to get into trouble”, I remember the EXACT words of the hotel owner – complete with those re-affirming hand-gestures of his.I really don’t understand why it is so hard for some people to say “Sorry, I DON’T know” or at least “I am not really sure”. GRRRRR.

It might not be the most comfortable bus to be riding in especially when we’re talking about 5 hours of traveling time but it might not be the worse either. I’ve been on some worse buses back in my home state Sabah in the North of Borneo so there really was nothing much worth complaining about at least on my side. 😀Some funny smell washed over me the moment I got in but my nostrils kinda got used to it in no time at all. There was a little fan on each row of the seats but I guess they had now become merely part of the deco because I don’t remember any of them working anyway. It was raining most of the journey and there was a profuse dripping of water from some of the air-con vents and it actually prompted some of the passengers to shift to another seat. o.OI myself had to keep reminding myself not to get too close to the window because the rain seemed to have found its way to sip in through the gasket of the window-frame. Amehhh! On the hindsight, the rain had actually saved our asses from getting roasted in the air-con-less bus. Imagine the heat and the smell in the stillness of the air inside. I could have simply suffocated myself to death even before I could  get to smell the air of Jaipur. He.

The bus wouldn’t really torture your physical beings by dragging you into a continuous ride for the whole 5 hours. Instead, it would stop at a restaurant called Midway Mahuwa (or something) and believe me, you wouldn’t want to cat-walk your way around in there.It was more like a toilet stop really. Maggie NOODLES might be the fastest food in existence but the tugging fear of getting left by the bus in the middle of nowhere had made the wait so inevitably long. The guy who was preparing the Maggie noodles didn’t make it any easier for me by whistling his way to the toilet for a good few minutes when I was very much on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Damn! If I was not that hungry, I would have left and let the guy eat that shit he himself had prepared. GRRRRR. But at least he was right when he said “, It’s OK. The bus is not going to leave you”. While punctuality seems to be a thing of importance in the bus system in India (my bravo), they’d actually make sure that all the passengers are already back on board before they take off. Phew!The bus journey was nothing short of things to see. I had come to realize how flat the land of Rajasthan is and the beautiful countryside was never a thing that I had expected from a country like India. It reminded me very much of the beautiful countryside in England where the lands are left to grow grasses until the next season of crop planting. It was so beautiful really.Of course, I had expected to see something like this for a bus in India though. Still, it made me chuckle when I finally saw it in real. I wish we could do that back in KL so that I could do a little bit of stunt by jumping from one bus to another in the middle of a PLUS Highway or something. It’d be a hilarious way of putting my name on the headlines for the wrong reason. LOLz.You know you’re almost there when you see the super flat countryside break into a series of beautiful hills and it is on the other side of these hills where the city of Jaipur is.The bus would make a few stops to get rid of passengers but unless you are really really sure where you’re stopping, you should just hang on until the bus makes its final stop at its final destination.You’d get straight out on to a large bus station – which I had just goolged and found the name to be Sindhi Camp Bus Station.Of course, being the primary bus station in Jaipur, you’d expect people to come up to you and offer all sorts of services as if you’ve never been taught to book a hotel room in the internet or anything of that sort back in your country.  The truth is, we didn’t make any reservation. It would have been OK if I didn’t have at least 10 kgs in my backpack plus another 75 kgs (uhuks! uhuks)  in my own body to be carried around under the scorching sun of Jaipur.

If there was something I had learned from my first few hours in Jaipur, it’d be to always book for a hotel room before traveling into a place that is totally foreign to me for the first time. IT wasn’t like there were no hotels around – in fact, there were quite plenty of them, plenty enough to put us into some kind of indecisiveness even in deciding which one to head to first.Without a good map in our hands, we had to slug our bags around, looking for at least a livable place to stay in for the next 3 days in Jaipur.Even making things more difficult for us was the fact that we couldn’t see any tourists around or at least somebody with the looks of a tourist. Whether people don’t really come to Jaipur or we were in the wrong part of the city. One of the hotels that we went into even REJECTED us because we were not Indian! WTH!The sight of a mat salleh couple had come as a relief to us and you know you can always trust white people when it comes to recommending a good hotel. Asian people can’t be more demanding than they are when it comes to hotel rooms right? I mean, apple to apple or rather, budget to budget.

Just go to TripAdvisor or Hostelbookers or probably Lonely Planet and you’ll see how they can come up with yawning-long paragraphs  of complain, telling about their encounter with bed bugs and coffee stains and treads of hair on the mattress more than anything else. 😀But then, you may want to keep reminding yourself that you’re in India and not in Bali or probably Phuket where people DO expect to stay in a swanky room with a private bath tub in the toilet and probably a swimming pool just down the stairs for less than 30 US Dollars per night.The room that I was checked into reminded me very much of those  cheap and seedy hotels that we used to have all over Keningau (my hometown) back in the 80’s. The only difference is, those hotels provided blankets for its visitors. Here at Bombay Hotel, they seem to expect you to get creative by wrapping yourself up in your towel to ward off the biting cold air of Jaipur at night. I actually went a little bit more creative than that by wrapping myself up with some of my used clothes. Feel free to imagine. LOLz. One of the things that caught my attention when I first arrived in India is the existence of something I really thought was THEIR version of air-conditioner – only it was much louder and nosier it actually gives you the feel of sleeping at the tip of an aircraft propeller or something. Imagine the gushing sound right at the back of your ears while you’re struggling to get a night decent sleep. Erkkkk! If you look closely, you’d see the layer of wood wools on the inside of the side vents and there is a container of water at the bottom of the box – probably to keep the cooling mechanism going. I wonder if those blood-sucking mosquitoes that came attacking me in the middle of the night had actually come from there.

<pic taken somewhere else>

The room has plenty of hooks on the walls, probably to make do for the in-existence of a wardrobe. *how classicAnd when was the last time you saw a squat toilet in a hotel room at least in this lifetime?  Imagine the ass-breaking effort of trying to stay balanced while doing the business after spending the whole day walking all over the city. My legs are trembling every time I think of it now. LOL. But then, it was only the beginning of our adventure in Jaipur. There was always something so exhilarating about coming into a totally new place and expecting the unexpected. I couldn’t wait to get back out and dig deeper into the streets of Jaipur.