Amer Fort-Palace

Lately I have been visiting India a lot. Incredible as it may sound, this year, between September to December, I have visited India three times, with a total stay of about 8 weeks! Yes, basically 2 months! Let me say this again for my own astonishment, over the last four months I was in India a total of two months! That is a lot of travelling. This is mostly business travel, but I have done significant amount of tourist activities in the middle as well. If I describe the entire thing, it will likely take me about of year to write it all at my pace, so I don't think I will try it. Even if I do bits and pieces of it, it will still take many tens of posts to cover just all the places I have visited! So without getting too deep into into it, I will start small with a single place. Amer.

Amer Fort or Amber Fort is a fort/palace about 7 km to the north of Jaipur, in the state of Rajasthan, western India. Overlooking Maota Lake, as seen in the picture above, it is perhaps one of the most dramatic of forts in Rajasthan, which is a state known for hundreds, if not thousands of forts. Earlier I had a technical conference in Jaipur, and I visited the fort on a break. I am familiar with the city of Jaipur, as during my youth, I have spent significant amount of time there. However, I haven't visited the place for about 25 years! So when I went back there again this year in September/October, I fell in love with the place again. I thought I should bring my kids here to show our old stomping ground.

Step Wells

Step Wells are common all over India, but they are spectacular in Rajasthan. Western India essentially being a desert, it had always been important for the society to conserve and store water, therefore the need for pond/wells. In addition, Rajathan being a state/region where wars have been fought for centuries, having a safe source of water was also strategically important. This is simply because, seize of a city (fort) was incredibly common, and one of the easy way to control any long seizure is to control the water source. So most city states were typically fortifications and they all had multiple wells, typically step wells. On the way to Amer fort is one such step well, Panna Meena ka Kund or Amer Stepwell.

Depending on the season and time of the year, the place can be quite crowded. However, early morning is usually a good time to visit. These days there are vendors along side of the well selling umbrellas and hats (pagri), which are inexpensive and fun things to buy. They are quite useful too, as the Sun is hot and bright this part of the world even during winter.

Elephant Ride

Yes, forget about animal cruelty in India (otherwise you will be mad!). If you want you can ride an Elephant here. There are a lot of them and you can ride them to get into Amer just like Rajput Rajas back in the days. Kids like that. I didn't do it, but adults can do this as well.

Amer Courtyard

Inside the fort, Amer is known for its spectacular Courtyard. People actually live here inside the fort. There are restaurants, banks, shops, etc inside the fort as well. This is nice to see the place is being used for day to day purposes and still kept relatively clean.