October 25th, 2019
Today we got up and took an Uber to the bus station. We left our big luggage at our hostel in Delhi and packed smaller bags to take with us for the week. I think Delhi is the most populated city we have been to with 18 million people. When we got to the bus station it was quite chaotic. I was looking at some of the buses thinking this was probably going to be yet another extremely uncomfortable ride as most of the buses looked absolutely trashed. However, to my great surprise when we finally located our bus in a different area it was a really nice, super comfortable bus! We got on and felt really happy about our comfortable six-hour ride to Jaipur.
We checked into another hostel and they were doing a free sunset activity at the “Monkey Temple”. We were just in time to join in. We went with a group from the hostel led by one of the workers. We crammed into some tuk tuks that took us to the base of a hill. Then we walked to the top to see the sunset over the city. Jaipur is another huge city and the air quality is really bad. It was a good view though and there were lots of monkeys. We continued walking to see the temple but didn’t get many pictures as there were “priests” or someone there trying to collect money for pictures.
I noticed on the six-hour bus ride here, it doesn’t seem that the rest of India is taking the same measures as the city of Delhi to try and be cleaner. Everywhere else looked more like what we saw in Nepal where the streets are just covered in trash.
The horns and traffic in Jaipur are just as bad as we made our way back to the hostel.
We met quite a few Americans on the sunset tour and a group of us decided to go to dinner together afterward. We went to a cool rooftop restaurant where we had nice city views. We just happened to be here for Diwali which is one of India’s largest and most important Hindu festivals. It lasts for several days and is celebrated all throughout India. All the cities decorate with lights and do fireworks. It is called the festival of lights and represents light over dark and good over evil. So, we got to see all the city lights for Diwali from the restaurant. Everyone seems very excited it is Diwali, and we were told it was the equivalent of our Christmas in the United States.
