Jaipur, Rathambore, Bundi

Jaipur

My absolute favorite city yet.  As large as Delhi but without the mass chaos, dirt and scary people.  In Jaipur everyone is friendly and helpful, there is ridiculously amazing shopping (I had to hit the ATM a few times in this city!)  Lots of indian shirts, pants, saris, silks, silver and precious stones...Jaipur has an intensely colorful sari market that we took a walk through, there must have been 100,000 saris of all colors, styles and shapes in the beautiful market!

We went to see a bollywood film in a beautiful theatre, but as with anything in my adventures, my favorite part was waiting outside the theatre and meeting some local boys.  I met a 21 year old boy who spoke french, spanish, english and of course hindi..he was incredibly smart.  His dream is to be a tour guide for something like Intrepid (my tour adgency).  Anyway, we are heading into the theatre when two members of our group decide to explore the city instead so we had two extra tickets.  Sarah and I invited my new little friend, Dinesh, and his mate into the movies with us, their smiles were huge!  As a group we all treated them to popcorn and coke etc..it was more fun to watch them watching the movie.  Afterward we found out it was only the second time they had ever seen a movie inside a theatre in their lives because the cost is too much for their familes...it was a beautiful experience.\
(Dinesh is now my facebook friend) lol

After the movie we went out for an amazing dinner and had a great time bonding as a group...I have definitely made friends for life on this trip.

We stayed in a beautiful palace hotel and cleaned up our clothes, bodies etc while we were somewhere that had good water and electricity.  My shower felt like nothing else!!!

After two nights in the beautiful city of Jaipur we headed to Rathambore..

Rathambore

The town itself is nothing..bad food, scary accomodations (Sarah and I slept holding onto one another in one corner of the two beds we had-the other bed had some sort of black crap all over it and bugs everywhere crawling in the sheets..we didn't sleep much!)  The reason we stopped in this town though was to go on a Safari through the jungle.  It is famous for hosting 23 bengal tigers, monkeys, varieties of deer, antelope, birds, lepords and panthers.  For 90% of the trip we were bored because it was all deer and birds..(wow) and the guides could see we were bored so without asking they drove the OPEN jeeps off into the bush where they are NOT suppose to go (we find out later) to try and look for bengal tigers.  Well, we found one!  Let's start by saying I am happy you all didn't read about a tour of morons eaten by a tiger in India!  The effing jeep got stuck in mud and rocks while backed up on a sleeping tiger that was awoken by the jeeps desperately spinning their wheels to get the hell out of there...there was a lot of panic and yelling in Hindi and a lot of amanda crying and screaming into the shirt of the person sitting beside me.  With two mins they managed to spin out and we took off at crazy speeds...they continued at high speeds all the way out of the jungle so obviously they knew we were all in a bit of a "position" with the tiger we awoke.  The guides asked us to never speak of what happened as we left the jungle!!!!!

Bundi..

Beautiful village, great people, we saw a royal palace that has been over taken by monkeys that will attack you if you make eye contact or gesture anywhere near them...awesome...just the kind of stress we all needed after our tiger expedition!  At one point our guide took a big stick and beat the ground in front of the approaching monkeys..some of my fellow travel mates got some pretty funny photos of my face as the monkeys got closer to me...lol

Afterward we walked through the village of Bundi, met some more cool local tribal people and bought tons of fruit at the markets...mmm  I discovered a new fruit only grown in India...I need to find out the name again!  Yummy stuff!
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Off to Bijipur in the morning..apparently it is stunning!  Can't wait!!