| Karauli Hotel | Karauli Palace |
| Karauli Town | Bharatpur Bird Park |
Karauli Hotel
Karauli is one of those places that hardly sees any tourists. You are received with a mixure of surprise and welcoming that you have to travel a fair way off the beaten track to get these days. It is beginning to discover tourism though, and provides one of the best hotels we stayed in. Not only did we get Bindis and flowers at the front door but it was a maharaja's home, complete with his cars and horses. Servants swept around the place like ghosts from a different time. We had tea on the terrace in the evening and spent the afternoon relaxing and recovering.
After our r&r time, it was back to exploring Karauli town itself. First off, there are a lot of wandering cattle in Karauli, more than I'd seen before. I've included some pictures of the more glamourpuss bovines.
At the centre of Karauli is the maharaja's palace. We of course assumed that we'd been there, but this place made the hotel look like a shoebox. It was so big that even the front yard afforded sufficient space to hold a cricket match (that's a bit of an exaggeration of course, becauce in India, any space is big enough for a cricket match).
The palace is beautifully decorated and provides the best views over the town, painted a traditional pastel blue.
Ganga (who stands on a crocodile) is the goddess of the Ganges.
One person was especially interested in us, this little girl who followed us in our walk all around the town. Given any opportunity, the children love the hold hands with you and just walk around, as if showing you off!
There's plenty for sale around the market - I liked the look of these sweets particularly. Of course, if you do actually stop to make a purchase then the crowd that's been following you has nowhere to else to go but catch you up as my wife found out when she wanted to buy yet another throw.
Like out in the fields is pretty tough of course. Here are some women returning from the days work at sundset as we walked back to the maharajas adobe hut.
Well, as you can imagine, after playing the Pied Piper until sunset on New Years Eve there was not much more ado than buy some whopping fireworks (you'd NEVER get these on sale in the UK), and head home for a few beers and a bangs!
New Years Day and we were off to the Bird Park. It was kind of exciting because the night before we'd found out that a tiger had escaped from the supposedly secure Ranthambore Park and walked all the way the Bharatpur Bird Park. It was now officially on high alert, but was it still letting anyone foolhardy enough to want to go in ? Of course !
Our luck was out again on the tiger front so I had to take some more regular pictures. We did get a 2 out of 3 though. First, we got to see the only rains in Rajasthan for years (of course we were prepared). Second we met up with Carol the tour leader we'd last seen in a really small village in the coutryside of China a year before - now that's coincidence. Oh yeah, we saw lots of birds too (the pied kingfisher is really rare).
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
