Jaipur

Our train was a couple of hours delayed and so we arrived into Jaipur just after midnight. After fighting our way through the scrum of touts and drivers we managed to negotiate a decent price and went to a nearby hotel which thankfully had one room left. It turned out to be a beauty of a place and is easily the best we have stayed at in India. We went into Jaipur and saw many of the sites - the Maharaja's Palace, the cenotaph where the royals are buried outside the city and the water palace (pictured). A really interesting one was an observatory built a couple of hundred years ago. It was filled with massive marble constructions which included the 27m high sundial which is accurate to a degree of 2 seconds (sunny days only). There were plenty others as well and despite our guide explaining everything I'm still not sure we grasped it all.
Hawa Mahal is the palace of the winds and is fairly famous locally. Its a building with some 360 tiny windows all carved out of the rock. Princesses used to watch life go by from there without having to be seen themselves.
The final thing we packed in here was a visit to the Amber Fort nearby which is again very impressive. On returning from that we decided to follow a walking route round the city. It was pegged at roughly 1hr but we thought that was fine - there was an air con cafe listed near the end which we could rest up in. Well, 2 and a half hours later we trudged wearily past where the coffee shop should have been. We were knackered and hot and still had another 8hrs to kill before our overnight train to Jaislamer which leaves at midnight (hopefully).