Images of India

"To Travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries"

.........Aldous Huxley British Author.

Travel teaches us tolerance..... Benjamin Disraeli British Politician and author

Amber Fort India

A short distance outside the 'pink city' of Jaipur is Amber Fort. We were transported to the Palace on the back of a brightly coloured elephant in a slow procession which lumbered its way up the steep slopes to the summit.

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The Amber Palace is an impressive complex of structures built by Man Singh, a Rajput ruler of Jaipur

Built in white marble and distinctive red stone the palace has wonderful galleries and sacred places like the dazzling Jagmandir hall of mirrors and the temple of the Goddess Kali. There is much to explore and discover here and it is not hard to imagine the opulent life-style these rulers of India enjoyed in times gone by.


When visiting the Palace try and get there as early as possible as the queues for the elephants start early and as the day wears on it gets pretty hot and crowded if you're standing around waiting.

Oh yes we did ask about the poor elephants trudging back and forth up and down the slopes. On reliable information we learned that each elephant only does four trips a day.....does seem hard to believe as it is a lucrative revenue earner for the owners. The Mahouts also expect a tip at the end so have some rupees at the ready.

Magical Devices

Jantar Mantar is Sanskrit for 'Magical Device" and in west central India there are five locations where these large outdoor astronomical observatories have been built. They were all constructed between 1727 and 1734 by Maharajah Jai Singh.

We visited the one in Jaipur which contains 13 different structures for calculating the time of day, the situations of the constellations and the prediction of eclipses.

Remarkably these giant masonry structures are still used today to forecast the weather, the duration of the seasons and the prospect of floods. Measurements can be made within one second of accuracy.