The long and winding road

Breakfast here is a lovely quiet time, sitting on the terrace with a fresh coffee, beautiful table linen and charcoal braziers for warmth . We couldn’t resist ordering more Mung bean pancakes and tried a Dosa Masala - a flat crepe style bread, fried on one side and wrapped around potatoes and peas. It was served with various small bowls of condiments that we all try but are completely in the dark as to what they are. When I say “All”, I really mean three of us....Josh had normal pancakes and an apple. They brought the boys hot chocolate this morning, served in a fancy white teapot and poured by the server with a flourish. 

We headed off by Tuk Tuk through to a road big enough for our little bus and climbed in to start the six hour drive to Jaipur. The bus had been pimped up for our drive -it was fragrant with sandalwood and white cotton covers had been put on all the seats. I’m not normally an incense fan, but perhaps there is a difference if the quality is good as it was very pleasant. 

It took about seven hours to get to Jaipur, including a stop for lunch half way through.  We stopped to feed some cows at one stage (the driver was very pleased with himself for organising it) and he offered to stop at any stage for photos but we were keen to press on. There was a lot to look at but it blurred together after a while. Periodically our driver would yell for us to look at something. What with the noise of our bus and the other road users, the Indian music on the radio, his very strong accent and his limited English we could understand very little. We nodded, smiled, and looked in the appropriate direction. I managed to get one “This is where all marble is cut, sold. Black, white, red. All colours. Agra, from here. Jodhpur from here. All marble. Black, white, red.“ Once I realised that he repeated himself, there were a few more clues to decipher but I’m still very curious about many of the things we passed and have no idea what we were looking at.

The hotel is spectacular - a 270 year old Palace surrounded by gardens. We had time to explore and play a game of doubles chess with the oversized Indian chess set on the terrace. It’s funny how everyone’s characters come out in a chess game. Josh plays a swashbuckling attacking game, thinking a few moves ahead but trusting to his intellect to solve future problems. Campbell has ten different ideas that he thinks might be good and can’t decide between them. He is polite about other people’s ideas and very helpful moving the pieces around and out of the way. Flynn is careful, measured and slows the whole game down to a crawl while he carefully considers both his moves and the other side’s assessing all risks and generally getting it right. I’m not commenting on my chess game. 

We had a slight hiccup before dinner when Josh’s uni timetable booking window was unexpectedly opened. Technology issues were causing grief so we left him to it and ate a quick dinner in the hotel, hoping he could finish and join us (no). It’s now 5am and he has called the uni to resolve.