Neemrana

“If you want to visit India, travel now, because from April onwards the only place you would like to be during week-ends is your living room with the A/C at maximum” - is the common advice we have received from nearly everybody since our arrival. And so, for the second week-end in a row we ventured outside Delhi ...

The destination of this week-end was Neemrana, a historical town in Rajasthan, about three hours from Delhi. The main attraction of Neemrana is, without any doubt, the Neemrana Fort. Built in the XV century, it became the third capital of the descendants of Prithviraj Chauham III, the Hindu king who ruled in Northern India during the second-half of the XII century. The Fort progressively lost importance during the centuries, and in 1947 Raja Rajinder Singh, the ruler at that time, decided to move out his residence from Neemrana, and tried for forty years to sell what remained of the Fort - but couldn’t find any buyer. Finally, in 1986, the ruins were acquired for restoration, and the Fort was transformed into a hotel.

Together with Arndt, Prerna, Riccardo and Yvonne we spent our week-end there, and it was like becoming children again. As in every self-respecting castle, the Fort was full of stairs, small terraces, observation posts, courtyards and gardens, secret passages, shortcuts, hidden corridors, etc. and the only thing we had to do was enjoying this unique playground! It was after the sunset though that the castle really became ‘magic’, as thousands of lights were lit-up, and the castle seemed to be hanging in space between the darkness of the surrounding valley and the night...