In the Pink

My story on Jaipur, India's 'pink city', from last year's Adventure World media trip, is published in the Flight Centre blog (click here to read).

  

Destination Fabulous

Another story from the recent Adventure World media trip to India, this one about the pink city of Jaipur, is published in this week's NZ Woman's Weekly (click here to read).
 
Currently girding my loins for the flight to Auckland, then to LA, then an 11-hour layover, then a flight to Detroit and then another to Nashville. Sometimes I wonder why I do this to myself!

Am, however, very much looking forward to the heat after yet another cold snap in Wellington.

See you on the other side...

How cool are these?

As a travel writer, I travel to, duh, write.

I also travel to shop, considering it a crime if, while I'm in some exotic locale, I don't help prop up the local economy with as much retail therapy as possible.

Tonight the Animator finally pulled finger and hung a few cherished items we bought in India. The anatomical poster, which features a cross section of an ear and is in both Hindi and English, now hangs in our living room. It was found in the COOLEST ever shop in Hauz Kaus, a chi chi enclave of shops in one of Delhi's most affluent suburbs. Now I am kicking myself for not bringing back more, as a friend who runs a vintage shop in Welli said he could have sold them 10 times over.

After much agitation, we also finally found a home for two Indian puppets we bought in a dusty scrap of a shop down a forlorn alleyway in Jaipur. I ADORE these puppets (which seem to be largely constructed from old saris) and although we spent an age trying to find the best spot for them, I am super pleased with their final resting place.

These are the things that made Shazzy happy today.

    

Heatwave

Reports from home tell us that New Zealand is currently shivering under a polar blast, but here we are sweltering in what the local media is calling an "unusually ferocious heatwave".

More than 500 people across this vast land have been killed by the heat so far and it is all anyone can talk about. But that's perhaps not surprising given the temperatures are nudging 50 degrees in the south of the country.

We are coping by drinking our body weight in water, mango juice and the highly addictive sour lime juice. That and worshipping at the temple of air conditioning whenever possible.

The Adventure World sponsored trip of the Golden Triangle has now come to an end so we are kicking back in Delhi for the next few days. I, of course, will be stuck in the air conditioned luxury of my room at the cool Metropolitan Hotel and Spa which, given the heat, is probably the best place to be but there will also be time for a dip in the pool, a ride on the Metro and a last bit of retail therapy.

In the meantime, I'm playing catchup with photos. Today's visual delights are from Saturday and Sunday when we explored the stunning 'Pink City' of Jaipur and its Wind Palace (Hawa Mahal), the Amber Fort, Maharaja's Palace and the Janta Manta Observatory.

Confession time: I wasn't totally comfortable about taking the elephant ride up to the Amber Fort. But chatting to the mahout (elephant wrangler), he assured us Samma, his 26-year-old pachyderm was his "best friend". And, to be fair, none of the 106 elephants who take visitors up to the Fort looked skinny or ill. So, you know....

That aside, Jaipur was fantastic and certainly an over-achiever when it comes to visual delights.            

Tiger, tiger, burning bright

Warning: excessive pictures of tigers follow.

We are now in Jaipur the "pink city" but in the last few days we clocked up three, count them, THREE tiger safaris in Ranthambore National Park. And unlike the British couple we met, who'd done 17 safaris and hadn't seen one tiger, we saw FOUR tigers, one on every safari. It was fricken unbelievable to be this close to the largest cat species in the world and I have been drunk on tiger love ever since.

NOTE: the Animator, as my official photographer, has way, way better photos (and a better camera) than me BUT the internet in our hotel room keeps cutting out (welcome to India!) so it's far easier for me to bung my pitiful pics on here in the meantime. Apologies as they in no way do justice to these incredible animals. One of the most amazing experiences of my life...

Although tigers were the main attraction, there was also lots of other wildlife to fill our cameras' memory cards: the park is teeming with wildlife, such as bears, leopards, Nilgai deer, peacocks (the native bird of India, in case you didn't know) and, of course, the adorable langur monkeys. I could so easily have taken one of those wee monkey babies home...