Thursday Feb 7 Excursion to the Amber Fort

Every conference has an excursion. With over 800 attendees, organizing any kind of trip is a major undertaking. We chose to visit the Amber Fort (along with 4 bus loads of our friends.)

Our trip started in the late morning. You don’t think that Physicists were going to take a whole day off to play, do you? If one gets to the fort early, an elephant is the means of transportation from the bus to the fort. We were late, so used jeeps. (Supposedly, there have been some problems with the elephant transport – fights between elephants etc. People have been hurt – even killed, so the guides don’t really encourage using them. I must admit I was a little disappointed.)

Here are some of the elephants going home after their work shift. They are only allowed to do 5 round trips in a day, but they have to walk from the elephant barns near Jaipur and back each day.

Here is Art in our more mundane transport: The fort is large and impressive sitting on a hill.

The façade inside the fort was obviously the inspiration for the front of the conference venue. (Actually, a direct rip-off.)

We saw where the 12 wives (and 400 concubines) lived. Each had their own apartment – but they could only talk to each other in a central pavilion:

The wives bathed by standing in a square pool. Servants poured scented water over her (for 2 hours) while the Maharaja looked on from a balcony.

They had an ingenious method of air conditioning. It worked like a swamp cooler, but on a larger scale. When asked how the water was brought up to the top, the guide said that they had a Persian screw pump, but also multitudes of people.

A very special room was done with mirrors imported from Belgium. Just one candle would reflect from all of the surfaces to create a well lit room. At the present time, this can no longer be part of the tour, but we did see examples of the mirror work.

We left the fort and proceeded to 2 restaurants for lunch. It is really hard to find places that can feed busloads of people very quickly. In truth, the ones we were at were really dismal.

After lunch we stopped at the water palace for a photo op. THEN THEY TOOK US TO 2 FACTORY TOURS!! One of which I had already been to for way too long. (They call them factory tours. Really they are a quick demonstration of some craft and then a hard sell. This was not what we had signed up for. We were supposed to go to the Observatory. Everyone was really upset. Because tuk-tuks seemed to be off limits at these places, it was impossible to escape. Chuck just stayed on the bus.

Back at the hotel, I developed a fever and chills. Too bad, we were entertaining all of our Chinese friends. I took two Tylenol and hoped for the best. It seemed to do the trick. I think that everyone enjoyed themselves. They only had to choose a drink and Veg or Non Veg. Everything else was fixed. We reminisced and told each other of our travel adventures. (Some of them had taken the train in India.)

Fell into bed and was asleep immediately.