Hot Air Balloon Ride at Jaipur, Rajasthan

I’d booked a sightseeing tour with a difference – a hot air balloon ride at Jaipur and at 5am at my hotel I got in the car Sky Waltz had sent for me and set off in the clear lilac dawn through streets mercifully free of traffic. The actual departure point for these rides is only decided on the morning according to weather, especially wind, conditions, but I was lucky and we headed to the magnificent Amber Fort, a few miles from Jaipur city centre and simply the most wonderful backdrop for a balloon ride. When we arrived, right below the fort on a wide field were three vans in a row each attached to a basket lying on its side and, spread on the ground, the huge, unwieldy balloon skins. The passengers were divided up into the baskets after a swift cup of chai, clambered in, safety briefing, the gas was switched on, the balloons inflated, and we gently rose as dogs barked furiously at the sight.

The massive walls of the 16^th century fort, home to the Rajput Maharajahs, shimmered in a biscuit colour in the pale morning light,row upon row of walls and battlements and ramparts, all protecting the inner core of the palace. Surrounding the fort are the Aravalli Hills with ancient walls snaking along the tops, and the typical bare and brown summer landscape of Rajasthan. We sailed on what seemed to be hardly a breath of air over the vast courtyard to admire the intricately carved gateway, over the formal mughal garden where we had watched a fed-up dancer performing after the sound and light show a few evenings before, over Maota Lake and admiring a view that was never intended by the builders to be seen by humans. The ride was silent, punctuated only by the sudden short roars of gas the pilot switched on to lift the balloon up to another air stream, and the murmurs and camera clicks of the four other passengers.  The other two balloons had drifted away in other directions and we were alone in the sky but we felt totally safe in the hands of the professional English pilot. It was exciting and tranquil at the same time which sounds contradictory!

We silently crossed above the fort and over Amber village where more dogs barked and we saw the rooftops of the ramshakle houses not far below, the carved spire of a temple, bright patches of well-watered gardens, and occasional flashes of vivid colour and sparkle as a woman walked along. In the distance smoke floated horizontally from the chimneys of the brick kilns on the plains, and ridges like rocky pastry crusts were scattered ahead as far as we could see. A pair of peacocks on the side of one of these hills cawed despairingly at the tops of their voices. In a semi-circle below us were the tops of the compounds of the tiger and lion rescue centre where circus tigers rest out their days in privacy and quiet. Blocks of new luxury hotel huddled in a little formal group to one side of the main road along which we watched the Sky Waltz car follow to see where we ended up, and we cruised over brown fields and patches of scratchy trees, eventually decorously sinking onto the gound as gently as we had taken off an hour earlier.  I don’t think any of us wanted to get out but we regretfully climbed out of the baskets as the crew held them down, then watched the balloons deflate and be folded carefully away in vast tarpaulins. We each took away a certificate and utterly unforgettable memories of a day trip of Jaipur that was definitely out of the ordinary!

For more information about day trips in India please email Tara@ReadyClickAndGo.com

Day Trip to the Taj Mahal by Moonlight

Visiting the Taj Mahal by Moonlight involves bureaucracy, tight security, the risk of fog in January and February and you aren’t even allowed to get very close, but the silvery gleam of the white marble and the shimmer of precious inlay stones through the darkness makes it all worthwhile.
The Taj Mahal is open at night for five nights a month when there is a full moon, and for 2 days before and 2 days after– except on Fridays when it is always closed for prayer and during the month of Ramzan (Ramadan).

You have to apply for tickets the day before you want to go, you cannot buy them for the same day – and the ticket office is at the Archaeological Survey of India office at 22 Mall Road, telephone 0562 222 7263 or 222 7261. To get there you go to the Shilpgram parking lot (from the eastern gate of the Taj Mahal it’s past the Oberoi Amarvilas Hotel) between 10am and 6pm, and from where you will be collected and taken by van to the office. You will need to take your passport so that your name, date of birth, nationality and passport number will be recorded, tickets cost 750 Rupees and are not transferrable. Each evening, 400 people in 8 groups of 50 are allowed to the first platform which is about 350 metres away from the main building, for 30 minutes between 8.30pm and 12.30am, but you must get there half an hour before the time on your ticket for security checks and x-rays. You can bring binoculars and cameras but not video cameras, handbags, tripods, tobacco, matches, food or mobile phones.

Full moon dates in the rest of 2011 and 2012 are as follows, so you can apply to see the Taj Mahal by moonlight on these dates plus 2 days before and 2 days after;

10 November 2011,

10 December 2011,
8 January 2012,

7 February 2012,

8 March 2012,

6 April 2012 (NOTE that the 6 April is a Friday and the Taj Mahal is closed on that day),

5 May 2012,

3 June 2012,

3 July 2012, (NOTE the full moon of 1 August falls during Ramadan and so there is no moonlight viewing),

30 August 2012,

29 September 2012,

29 October 2012,

27 November 2012 ,

27 December 2012.

If you would like to visit the Taj Mahal by moonlight but are not able to buy tickets 24 hours in advance, ReadyClickAndGo can arrange the entry tickets for you as part of their selection of private day trips in Agra with your own guide, car and driver. If you are not staying in Agra you can book a same-day Agra tour from Delhi, and a comfortable, air-conditioned car will pick you up from your hotel in Delhi and take you to Agra where you meet your guide for the day. After exploring Agra Fort and the ‘baby taj’ you can enjoy viewing the Taj Mahal before returning to your hotel in Delhi. Email Tara@ReadyClickAndGo.com

The Dabbawallahs (Tiffin-carriers) of Mumbai

A unique and quietly spectacular process takes place in Mumbai twice a day. Each day 200,000 hot home-cooked lunches are delivered to students, workers and managers in their offices by a barefoot fleet of 5,000 white-uniformed lunch box men, tiffin carriers or dabbawallahs.

Their favourite curry and chapati is lovingly prepared at home by the worker’s wife or mother in the morning, packed into a tiffin box or dabba which is usually a large tin cylinder divided into sections inside, collected by a wallah usually on a bicycle from the home in the suburbs and taken to the local railway station. There it joins the other dabbas which are sorted by destination and put on the right train. At stations along the way other wallahs collect the batches of dabbas for that destination and carry them on long trays holding about 35 or 40 dabbas (each weighs about 2kg) and deliver them to the hungry worker at his desk or in his factory by one o’clock. Afterwards, the process is reversed with the empty dabba. A simple, door-to-door service that costs customers around 300 Rps or £5 a month, has no technology or documentation just colour-coded symbols – but a logistical nightmare. Nevertheless, the dabbawallah organisation achieves a 99.99% efficiency rating that is envied by the biggest businesses in the world.

This complex system seems to be only possible logistially in Mumbai where there is a dense network of trains running from the suburbs in the south to the business centre in the north, and where there are large numbers of middle-class workers facing a long, crowded commute and who leave home before their wives or mothers start cooking and wouldn’t want to carry a tiffin box anyway. It started with the British and Parsi population who didn’t like the local food and who wanted their wives’ cooking delivered to them, and the idea caught on amongst the Indian workers of Bombay who, as a rule, still prefer home-cooked food at lunchtime.

Now an army of 5,000 dabbawallahs in white kurti uniforms with white caps are a Mumbai institution. They are largely illiterate Maharashtrians from rural Pune whose fathers and grandfathers were dabbawallahs too, but this is a reputable and relatively well-paid profession with its workers, all self-employed, required to invest an equal amount in what is essentially a co-operative, and paid the same, up to 5,000 Rps a month. They regard themselves as shareholders in their own business, and their strict teamwork, timing and precision ensures success for all.

Follow one of Mumbai’s celebrated dabbawallahs on a typical day and go behind the scenes on a private tour with your own guide and driver, organised by ReadyClickAndGo. Watch the intricate system of collection and distribution of the tiffin boxes from start to finish, prices for a private 4-5 hour tour are from £22.50 contact Tara@ReadyClickAndGo.com for more details.