Samode Palace, Rajasthan, India

Flying north from Cochin to Jaipur we found out what the warning ' flight times are indicative' meant!
I thought it meant that flights could arrive late.........
Our flight from Cochin was due to arrive in Mumbai at 1.30pm and our flight to Jaipur was scheduled for 2.50pm.  Plenty of time to change planes in the same terminal. However when we got to Mumbai we found that the second flight had been advanced by one hour!  And we never received any notification of that.
Thankfully we just made the plane, although they were just closing the check-in desk when we arrived.
We had decided to stay in the Samode Palace about 40kms north of Jaipur. This is a rather splendid place to stay.......

With many interior courtyards....

And so far has had by far and away the best food we have had in India!
They have two restaurants and one has a chef doing experimental 'nouvelle indian cuisine'.....

 Our suite was quite nice...

But the public interiors were extremely oppulent!

Samode village was a different story!

Here nestled under the gate to the Palace...

 10,000 people live in very minimal circumstances.  Think Roman times in Europe! The only mod con was electricity. Waste water was running in trenches at the side of the old cobbled streets....

This is the doctor’s office, where they pay 5 rupee per doctor's visit, which for them is probably not an insignificant sum. They can also get free clean water....

The type of work going on is a mix of crafts… gems, cotton bedspreads and we saw these people making rubber bangles……

However some of the workers are working as though it were the middle ages...

Steel smelting (?)

Breaking coal into lumps…...

And donkeys are used to carry items from one area to another…..…

Waiting for donkey pick-up!

These donkeys don’t seem to care!

It would seem to be a hard life for the people living there.

We were shown around by a young villager who has been sponsored by the governement to help the locals as he speaks English and French and they can only minimally communicate. He had actually been to California!

And the food we ate at the Palace was not prepared by this local catering company!