Awakened in the very early hours by duelling calls to prayer from nearby mosques. Haven't seen them, but definitely know they are there. Ken had breakfast in the hotel restaurant.
 
Today we spend the whole day touring Jodhpur with our driver Mr Guru. Left at 9 and drove up to the Mehrangarh fort. Its very high!

Bought our tickets and walked up the road and through the 7 gates to get to the Phool Mahal palace at the top.

Toured the palace museum with an English-language audio-guide and headphones.
 

Sat in on a 5 minute demonstration of traditional music and musical instruments, which was cool.

After touring the palace, we walked along the wall of the fort for a but, but there wasn't much to see as it was mostly closed to the public and the parts that were open had high walls that you couldn't see over.

In the fort (and several other places around town) we saw public drinking fountains that consisted of a tap and/or a water jug with a metal cup on a chain. People would fill the cup and drink, then pass the cup to the next person.

After the fort we went to the big Jaswant Thanda cenotaph, which some call 'Rajasthan's Taj Mahal' because of the quality of the white marble stonework. It was pretty. Inside the temple the walls glowed in some places due to the sun bleeding through the translucent marble.

After that we drove across town to the new palace. On the way Mr Guru stopped at a market so we could get a cold drink. It was a 'normal' western-style grocery store, with isles of packaged food and a produce section and a small bakery. It's the first one of it's kind that we'd seen since arriving in India. I'm sure it was overpriced compared to the regular market, but the prices are fixed so at least we weren't getting ripped off because we were tourists. We loaded up on water, pop, snacks and a couple bananas. The total cost was just 100 rupees, or about $2. Still really cheap!

The new Umaid Bhuwan Palace was built by the former royal family in the 1930s. It's still one of the largest private residences in the world, though 2/3 of it has now been converted to a very, very expensive hotel. (About $1200 per night, which by Indian standards is ridiculously expensive).

Inside there is a museum where you can see photos of the other parts of the palace that you are not allowed to go to. Its all art deco design from the building itself to the furniture to the dishes. Too bad we don't get to see it!

From the museum entrance we could see the front gate of the hotel where departing guests were attended to by dozens of porters and even a live band.

After that, our driver took us to a park in a ravine on the edge of the city called Mandore Garden, which he said had some interesting sights. At the gate we had to get past the beggars and the buskers. One of the musicians followed us for several hundred feet down the long lane leading into the park playing his song and then wanted us to pay him.

Once inside we could see that the park was a terrible mess. Everything seemed to be falling apart. There was garbage everywhere. Nevertheless, we saw some cool stuff.

There was a shrine with lots of people coming and going.
 
A water channel through the park with lilly pond and some kids swimming...

Several very cool cenotaphs...

And lots and lots of monkeys!

There was also a small fort with a museum, but we didn't go in as we'd seen enough of those in the past few days.

A couple times Heather was stopped by young men wanting to have their picture taken with her. She also noticed that she was getting stares from the older ladies and thought it might be because she didn't have her shoulders covered.

We happened upon an area with a particularly large group of monkeys. There was some kind of fight where a bunch of monkeys tried to steal a baby from its mother. In the melee some of the smaller monkeys got knocked around. One started crying and another went over to comfort it with hugs and pats on the back. It was so human-like it was disturbing.
 
Later, a man came with a bag of cucumbers and handed them out to the monkeys, chastising those that fought over them. Then another man came and dumped a big bag of chic-peas on the sidewalk and all the monkeys came to eat. The man had to keep chasing away the cows who tried to eat the monkeys' food.
 
On the way out of the park we saw two men picking up garbage, the first evidence we'd seen of anyone doing anything toward cleaning up the awful mess. They had a wheel-barrow full of fire, which they pushed from place to place and just threw the garbage into the burning wheelbarrow as they went.

After that our driver took us to a shop where we could buy some cold beer and water and then back to the hotel. As we did the previous evening, we sat on the balcony above the lobby where there was wifi and nursed our beers for an hour or so.

In the evening we wanted to try one of the nearby restaurants that served typical local Rajasthani dishes, so we walked back down to the Sardar Market area. When we got to the restaurant we found it closed.

We were just deciding what to do next when Heather slipped on the slimy rocks and fell into the ooze on the street in front of the restaurant. When she got up she was unhurt, but had goop smeared on her hands, arms and various other areas of her person.
 
We hurried back to the hotel where heather showered and washed her clothes in the sink. Then draped her clothes over some chairs and turned the ceiling fan on high to dry them out. By this time it was getting late, so we just went up the the hotel restaurant on the roof and ate there. It was okay, but not as good as other places we've been eating.

Ken went down to the lobby for wifi again and when he came back up at about 10 pm he found hotel staff bedded down for the night on mattresses on the floors of the hallways.