Jodhpur

Another town wih a Maharajah who is rich and influential. He owns two local palaces - one in the middle of a lake and one up in the surrounding mountains - a change from the flat plains of most of Rajasthan. The mountain palace is known as the Amber Fort. There is a very old Spike Jones song called 'The Danube Isn't Blue, Its Green". Similarly, the Amber fort isn't amber, but more of a light pastel yellow. The name ''amber'' comes from the Hindi for ''high'' - meaning high as opposed to low rather than a drug-induced state. It, like all good forts, is very difficult to access, and many visitors pay a modest few rupees to go up by elephant. But I do know my limitations, and we went over an appalling mountain road instead. When we arrived the guide said that we were wise to have eschewed the elephant option, as a week earlier one of the elephants had ''got angry'' and had thrown two Japanese to the ground. We could only surmise whether there had been a causal connection.
Arguably the Amber Fort is more impressive and in better shape than the Red Fort at Agra or at Jaipur, though it's a close competition. One dislay at the Amber showed a sedan chair by which the Maharanee was carried around. Because of the combined weight of her clothes and jewels, she was incapable of self-propulsion. Another curious fact was that the Maharajah in power in 1947 ran for political office, but lost because he couldn't speak a word of the local languages, having been educated entirely in English n England - Eton & Oxford.
Getting around the Amber Fort ws such an exhausting task for me that we called it a day after that and rested in preparation for another long and uncomfortable trip the next day to Narlai, a the apex of a triangle north between Jodhpur and Udaipur. We stayed in a modest palace which had been a hunting lodge for the M. of Jodhpur, and still owned and managed by a family member. It was pleasantly run-down, but under renovation, and we enjoyed the simple family atmosphere. We set out the next day to see a very ornate Jain temple, but were wearing shorts. They offered to lend us a kind of sarong, but we were also required to remove both shoes and socks, and I drew the line at this. I had been prepared on earlier occasions to take off my shoes, but not my socks. So we admired the temple from outside. An observation which came to me over and over throughout India was that state-subsidized pedicures would lift the morale of the population enormously.
Our next and last stop befor Mumbai was Udaipur, but more about this next time.