The Road to Jaipur

Saturday morning, earlyish. I think we left at about 7am but my brain is a little cynical about that fact. Although I seem to have been getting up progressively earlier every day since I got here, so I fully expect to be getting up at about 12am by the time I go home.

Our driver, Nando (something longer which I may note when I find the bit of paper he wrote it down on) - a different chap and indeed I think a different company to our normal driver Jaswinder - immediately Un-endeared himself to us by spending the first half hour trying to upsell us a tour guide for the next 2 days (no charge, on the company). Having endured The Guide on my first road trip in India, it wasn't something I was particularly keen to repeat. Guides may know stuff about where you visit, but they make you go round things at their speed, and wandering aimlessly isn't really approved of. Plus they take you to shops where they earn commission and generally turn things into a Package Trip. At the end of a busy week, I'm sadly quite happy to amble aimlessly around historic monuments, pausing to read the Archaeological Survey of India signs when they turn up, checking in guide books to get things like names and dates, and shamelessly eavesdropping on other groups' tour guides for a few minutes if they happen to be lurking in the same spot as I am. So we put Nando off. Of course he probably eventually realised that if we weren't giving a tip to a Guide, then he might get a bigger one.

We had chosen a Toyota Qualis (an Indian model I think) which is a high-up 4WD car which seems pretty tough, and is very popular with visitors on road trips. The bit of extra height gives you a, perhaps unrealistic, sense of safety in the mad traffic. I've said it before, and it still seems to be true, that "might is right" on the roads here*.

One tiny downside to the car was that the top of the windows are fairly lowish so with my height all I could really see was the safety handle (you know, the one you hang onto as the driver heads the wrong way down the road with lorries heading towards you at 60kph) - and I ended up banging my head on it many times too as we went over potholes. So I slouched a bit (not good for the back, but more interesting than the safety handle).

It's about 260km from Delhi to Jaipur. The road was reasonably well maintained (it seemed quite stressful at the time, but that was before we'd done the Jaipur > Agra leg, so we were obviously being eased into madness slowly). There were quite a few bumpy bits, but someone had very carefully made sure that every single kerb stone on the central reservation had been neatly painted black and white in case any zebras wanted to hide. See below, with added lorries.
We stopped off en route at a tourist restaurant (identifiable by the chap playing a scratchy hand-sitar and the small child dressed up dancing. Plus there was a lot of green grass serving no obvious purpose.) The driver needed a short break, but we just stood around stretching our legs, like these Indians.
At one point we saw a car the same size as ours pull up and out poured about 20 people. Which seems mad, although a) most of them were children and b) considering that later we saw smaller cars with more people, and that this one didn't actually have people clinging onto the back running board, we didn't realise that "we ain't seen nothing yet".

This is our car: *Unless you're a cow.