Jaipur

Lara managed to find a decent cup of coffee at the Indian Coffee House. This is a worker-owned cooperative that emerged in the 1940s and now has over 400 shops across India. Malcolm and Lara are still not at 100% health, so Chloë and Dale and I took to the streets of Jaipur to see what we could see. We started with an hour long Uber ride that should have taken 10 minutes. After narrowly missing several family laden motorbikes and speeding tuk-tuks on the main road, our driver opted for a narrow alley that was never intended for cars. We crawled along while streams of frustrated motorbikes and pedestrians squeezed past us in both directions. No matter how inexperienced or timid this driver was, he still managed to navigate the Indian roads and traffic far more effectively than I ever will. We left our driver still negotiating with the alleyway congestion to visit Hawa Mahall and a collection of early astronomical measurement tools at Janter Munter.

The following days, with everyone on the team more or less back to normal, we managed visits to the Amer Fort and Galtaji (or colloquially, The Monkey Temple).Read more