Next we went to the new palace behind the Hawar Mahal or the windy windows building (the one room deep façade). The Maharajah, Sawai Jai Singh born 1688 AD, who reigned during the 18^th century first established Jaipur. He built a number of observatories around India, with the show piece inside the grounds of this palace. They are typically enormous sun dials and devices for predicting astrological birth signs etc, but they showed that he had a very good knowledge of astronomy.

See where the two people on the right are pointing – the suns shadow cast from the marble edge of the stair case makes it possible to read the time to within 20 seconds. The big one he built later, 5 storey’s high, of this same design records time in 5 second intervals. Sailers came from Bombay and Calcutta to reset their navigational chronometers.

Just by the way – see the cows wandering down this road – it is a very busy main street in Jaipur – and they are going the wrong way on the wrong side. There really are cows all over the place – you just walk right by them and try not to get hit by their tail as the swish it about. Jaipur is also the gem cutting center for colored stones in India and one of the worlds leading places for emeralds (although most are imported here as rough and then cut and polished).

There are two almost identical versions of this swimming pool sized hollow hemispherical marble structure, side by side. An entrance from below makes it possible to walk around and measure the position of the planets and daily time for very accurate birth zodiac and astrologic predictions. The adjoining structure had the missing parts of the hemisphere in place. There are fine curved lines engraved into the marble for astrological predictions.

That night we went back to the train for dinner, the on board food was just OK, and the wine was very expensive so we mainly drank a beer or two. It was a very long overnight train journey. Sleeping on a rocking train is just wonderful; the only complaints I heard were that when ever we stopped to let another train past as we were sometimes on single track lines - we would often wake up when the rocking stopped.