Jaipur: The Walled City and the Monuments in Jaipur experienced a surge of tourists over the long Weekend spanning four days. While serpentine queues could be seen at the historical monuments, the Walled City witnessed immense traffic jams stretching over hours as vehicles jostled for space, choking the ‘World Craft City’. Independence Day celebrations also doubled up for traders who smiled all the way to the bank post GST, as the city experienced brisk business over the weekend.

The fact that rush on long weekends has become a norm with the Walled City and the monuments with domestic tourists from the north that largely dominated the scene, goes on to elucidate that either a lot of Indians still haven’t seen the historical monuments or they just can’t get enough of the slice of history, that the ‘Pink City’ holds.

Among the local monument sight-seeing, Amber Fort remained the preferred destination with just on-the-spot bookings, garnering revenue of nearly Rs 50 lakh over the weekend. World Heritage monument, Jantar Mantar earned about Rs 14 lakh through domestic tourists. Nahargarh was the third most visited monument with Rs 6.33 lakh and Albert Hall despite being shut on Monday managed to touch a revenue of Rs 5.77 lakh. And this is when the online data was not available owing to a half day holiday in the government on Wednesday.

“We are overwhelmed with the response and ran houseful on the weekend. The Jaipur Wax Museum was packed with almost 1250 tourists on all three days. We are expecting a great season forward and hope to touch an overall foot-fall of two lakh tourists till we complete one year of launch on the 17 December 2017. So far 76000 tourists have visited the museum,” said Anoop Srivastava, founder director of the wax museum at Nahargarh.

Besides, another must do on the list of tourists, the Niros restaurant, ran choc-o-bloc right through the weekend. “These kinds of weekends do great good to the city. Business in the city was generally low after the GST, despite great discount deals but everyone right from handicrafts to textiles to the quintessential footwear could be seen churning out good business. We had to stop reserving tables as the queue outside kept us on our toes up to midnight,” said Rajnish Pardal from Niros.

So much was the traffic over the weekend when all roads led to Amber and the Walled City that it took an hour for the director Archeology & Museums to reach Amber Fort from his office at Albert Hall. “And just about the same time to get back. People travelled nearly eight hours on the NH-8 to reach Jaipur from Delhi, I am told,” said Hridesh Kumar Sharma.