Bundi

The next stop on our Rajasthani tour is Bundi. Once a capital city in the region, most of the historic sites have been left to the bats, pigeons and monkeys. We spent four days here in a historic haveli (mansion) that is 450 years old. It is run by a family and the home-cooked food is AMAZING. The follow is a video of the haveli - it's broken into two clips because we ran out of battery at the end.

We toured around the long forgotten palace the first day. The royal family still owns the palace and recently opened it up for tourists. It sits underneath a fort, which we did not tour because the price was too high. Something that greatly bothers us here is the constant price raising for foreign tourists to visit sites and we've found many to not be worth the extra rupees. The money does not seem to be put back into the historic sites, and after you've been to as many Indian cities as we have, you learn to be a bit more selective.

Bundi's second claim to fame is Rudyard Kipling wrote part of Kim here in 1900. Yesterday we walked out to the palace Sukh Mahal where Kipling stayed (and we found he only stayed there for 2 days). I picked up a copy of Kim and am about halfway through it.

Sukh Mahal

Other Bundi highlights: we worked as proprietors of the homestay one night while the family went to a party, we untied a goat caught in some rope in the middle of the street, we played with Taniksha (who may be the cutest baby in all of India), we had the worst chow mein yet and the best Indian food yet, and Jeff tried to scare off one of the mean red-faced monkeys at the palace but ended up getting scared off himself (those are scary monkeys!).