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After a long planning and endless discussions, our much awaited journey to Rajasthan finally started on November the 14th of 2009 (Children’s day). Plan was to leave home early in the morning but with 2 toddlers, 2 teenage girls and 6 middle age adults it’s never easy :) We hit the road just 3 hours behind schedule at 9 am. We were in two vehicles…Suzuki Esteem sedan and a Toyota Innova mini-van which turn out to be pretty comfortable than I actually thought when we hired it. We were bit disheartened to find that there is no place for audio CD or a Cassette…but were pleasantly surprised to find a USB port, its a thumb drive deck …WOW…India is way ahead my teenage niece told me quietly…we were excited…our 8 GB of audio will be with us all the time. Pretty Sweet!

Camel Safari at SAM dunes during Sunset.
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Continuing with my ongoing journey of exploring this beautiful country of ours -India, and moving forward from where I left this majestic state of Rajasthan (earlier trip being to Neemrana Fort Palace), this time around enticed enough by a long weekend from the 25th of December to the 27th of December we(our family) decided to visit the city of forts n palaces- Jaipur. We drove across the Delhi- Jaipur highway, the journey usually takes about 4 1/2-5 hrs but due to flyover construction work at Bairoad and Kotputli, it took us around 7 hrs to reach our hotel in Jaipur. All the fellow travelers are thus cautioned to try and leave as early as possible, by 6 am or so, as opposed to 8am (when we started), to cover this stretch of 280 km, so as to avoid traffic congestions at the two locations mentioned above. One is welcomed into the city by its splendid arched huge pink gates. Its believed earlier Jaipur was confined to the inner stretches and restricted to these massive “city gates” .

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We had a three day long weekend coming up in September,2009 and wanted to drive down to someplace close to Delhi in a radius of 200 kms. After a lot of searching on the internet and asking around, we zeroed in on the Bharatpur Bird sanctuary. The next challenge was to find a place to stay. Again, internet came to the rescue and we decided that we’ll stay at The Birder’s Inn (http://www.thebirdersinn.com ). However, the decision to book the place was left at run-time and we didn’t reserve the birder’s inn beforehand (we were really thankful for that afterwards)

The Road
We started at 9:30 a.m. in the morning in our Maruti Swift. Took the road via Faridabad towards Mathura, onto the NH-2 and then there s a right turn for Bharatpur.The road is real good except for the last 10 kms which does not have a road at all. It has only potholes and mud. We reached bharatpur at around 2:30 p.m. One can reach quicker than we did. We just took a lot of frequent breaks in between.
En-route, the only good option to eat is either one Mall towards your left when you enter Mathura (which has a Pizza Hut) or a Mc Donald’s which is near the Mathura Refinery. If you choose to eat at the Mc D’s then you’ll have to go straight for about 8-10 kms and then come back again to take the cut towards Bharatpur. So, stick to Pizza Hut or carry your own food. We had our food so din’t stop anywhere.
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Driving on petrol is a pain and it ruins your ghumakkarness. Therefore I bought a new diesel IKON on this Dhanteras. On the day I brought the car to home, I started thinking of driving to somewhere far, at least a journey more than 500 kms.

In the search of weekend getaways from Delhi, I searched ghumakkar but couldn’t find any reference for Ajmer and Pushkar. I was planning to visit Pushkar during its world known cattle fair and finally started for Pushkar and Ajmer on Friday 23th October 2009 night at 1:15 AM. We thought to reach Pushkar by 7-8 early mornings. I planned to complete the journey in three patches, Delhi – Behror, Behror – Jaipur bypass, Jaipur bypass – Pushkar.

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