Rickshaw ride for Rs 6,756: Travel agencies ready to fleece tourists during Jaipur Lit Fest

With the Jaipur literature festival all set to begin on 21 January, and a huge flock of foreign tourists who will soon come to the Pink City, travel agencies are preparing all sorts of packages to fleece them. [caption id=“attachment_2030619” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Travel agencies are all set to fleece foreign tourists during Jaipur Lit Fest. Reuters[/caption] Taking full advantage of the tourists’ ignorance about the usual price rates, travel agency websites, some have their pages featured on the official Jaipur Literature Festival website, offer a cycle rickshaw ride for nothing less than Rs 6,756 while the festival is on, according to this report in The Times of India. Normally, that rickshaw ride would cost Rs 30, says the report. Moreover, it’s not even the rickshaw-puller who gains even a single penny from the difference. The report also says that a balloon ride in Jaipur during the festival costs Rs 20,837, 30 percent more expensive than the usual price. An elephant ride is offered at Rs 5,247 whereas the usual rate is from Rs 1,500 to Rs 2,000 at the Nahagarh Biological Park. With Nobel laureate VS Naipaul, 2013 Man Booker Prize winner Eleanor Catton, novelist Hanif Kureishi and current Man Booker Prize nominee Neel Mukherjee scheduled to attend the Zee Jaipur Literature Festival 2015, it will undoubtedly attract a lot of foreign tourists from all over the world. The eighth edition of the five-day festival will be held from 21 to 25 January at the Diggi Palace in Jaipur. Also in attendance will be British journalist Christina Lamb, Urdu critic Rakshanda Jalil, poets Arvind Krishna Mehrotra and Kedarnath Singh, German children’s author Cornelia Funke and Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid, among others. British historian and writer William Dalrymple and Gokhale are the directors of the event that has previously hosted acclaimed writers like Orhan Pamuk, JM Coetzee, Kiran Desai, Vikram Seth, Pico Iyer and Mohammed Hanif. “This may well be one of the strongest international lists we’ve ever fielded at Jaipur with several writers I’ve been chasing for almost a decade - Nicholson Baker, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Elizabeth Gilbert, Paul Theroux, Eleanor Catton, Kate Summerscale and Alberto Manguel - finally agreeing to come and star at Diggi,” Dalrymple had said. (With inputs from IANS)