Daniel Sahib and Rachel Memsahib visit the land of the Kings (part two)

Eight hours further down the road (including stops for a couple of temples, of course) was Jodhpur, city of the stupid trousers. Actually, Jodhpur is known as the blue city – in much the same way as all of Jaipur’s houses are painted pink, Jodhpur’s are blue. This, apparently, is because blue discourages insects.

A Jain temple, Jodhpur

View of the hills from the Jain temple

Jodhpur, the blue city

Our hotel, another homestay, was on the outskirts of the city. It was run by Indian Christians who also had some sort of link with an art and furniture export company – the place was stuffed with antiques: a Victorian billiard table in the upstairs room, old horned gramophones in a quantity that almost qualified as an infestation and, in pride of place between living room and dining room, keeping a pair of beady glass eyes on all who ate, a faded and slightly sorry-looking stuffed tiger. I mean that in the sense of taxidermy, rather than a cuddly toy.

Jodhpur hotel dining/living room. Note the tiger on the left.

That evening, we got a lift into Jodhpur with a view to wandering the streets as we had in Pushkar and Udaipur before. Jodhpur, though, is something like 50 times the size of Pushkar with a population around the million mark. It was crazy. We walked through the dust and fumes of the main bazaar, had a quick look round the purported tourist area then panicked and headed straight for the nearest expensive-looking hotel. As it turned out, our panic served us well and we ended up in the Lonely Planet restaurant pick for the second city running. The atmosphere was marginally spoiled by a rainstorm that Noah might have found familiar, but we returned the following evening for several beers and a perfectly wind-cooled, clear-skied end to the day. The day that was spent, surprisingly enough, looking round a fort. Jodhpur fort though was probably our favourite, on account of the informative (but not over-informative) audio-guide that came with the price of admission. It is a spectacular thing that fort, never once taken by force in all its existence. And it had a nice shop too.

Jodhpur fort

The sati marks by the fort's gate - each of Maharaja Man Singh's 31 widows left a hand mark on the wall as they made their way to throw themselves on his funeral pyre in 1843.

Musicians in Jodhpur fort

A camel cart - a very common mode of transport in Rajasthan

From the blue city, we headed to the golden city – Jaisalmer (golden due to the colour of the stone rather than the houses being painted in this instance). Jaisalmer is on the edge of the great Thar Desert and we were booked for a night in a hotel and a night in a desert campsite following a camel safari. The hotel, at first, seemed a little far out, but it turned out that Jaisalmer, despite having a fort that is visible for many, many miles around, is actually very small. The hotel was new (therefore clean – the habit here seems to be to build an hotel then run it until everything stops working through an accumulation of grime and lack of care, then gut it and start again, rather than the conventional hotelier’s program of ongoing cleaning and maintenance) and very comfortable. The rooftop restaurant served excellent vegetarian food with a fantastic view of Jaisalmer fort on one side and of what was optimistically termed ‘the lake’ on the other (in actual fact, with the monsoon season only just starting it was a tiny patch of mud with a few wild pigs rolling around). That night a storm of a magnitude never before witnessed by either me or Rachel hit. Jaisalmer frequently goes for years – often up to seven years between showers. But it more than made up for it that night.

The old and the new - mausolea and wind farming in Jaisalmer

Cricket in Jaisalmer

The next day, for a change, we went sightseeing. Jaisalmer fort is a living thing, with houses, hotels and businesses within its walls. The problem is that it was designed 500 years ago for a few hundred people. Nowadays, the millions of gallons of extra waste water coursing through its drains cut into the porous rock upon which the fort is built, undermining the entire edifice. Several parts of the fort have already collapsed into rubble and the whole thing is slowly sinking into the desert. The museum part of the fort was another with a free audio guide. However, the incomplete nature of the museum as a tourist attraction and the desire of its curators to be perceived as giving value for money meant that a great deal of the audio guide was given over to long and largely decidedly uninteresting stories about… well I don’t know as I stopped listening.

Jaisalmer, from the top of the fort

Autorickshaws (Tuctucs), Jaisalmer

We enjoyed Jaisalmer, though our day there was somewhat tempered by my constant fretting about the camel safari and desert camping. I don’t know what the hell I had been thinking when I agreed to it. Nothing, I suspect. As three o’clock drew near, I fretted more and more, coming very close to deciding to call the whole thing off. But we went through with it. Sort of. We were driven about an hour (though bearing in mind the roads, that was only about 25 miles) out towards the Pakistani border and the Sam sand dunes in the Thar Desert. We were dropped at the ‘campsite’ – a fly-blown collection of dank concrete huts ranged around a small stage. From here, we were hefted onto a camel each and led off into the desert. Oscar Wilde famously said that one should try everything once with the exception of folk dancing and incest. I can confidently add camel-riding to that. I have never (thankfully) experienced anything like it before, but if you can imagine being on a very smelly see-saw opposite a fat man on amphetamines who occasionally reaches across and hits you in the testicles with a mallet, you’re halfway there. I hated every stinking second. Unfortunately, towards the end of the ride (an hour! A goddamned hour!) my camel sat down suddenly wrenching my hip. This meant that because of the hard beds at the ‘campsite’, we couldn’t spend the evening there watching Rajasthani folk-dancing. Instead we had to return to the incredibly comfortable, air-conditioned hotel and have a fantastic supper and several cold beers before getting 10 hours of uninterrupted sleep. Damn those camels.

Rachel on a camel. She was a lot better at it than me.

The camel that tried its level best to kill me

Next came Bikaner. It rained like the end of the world, which was apt as Bikaner looked like the end of the world. We were supposed to spend 2 nights there, but chose not to. The hotel looked like it had been quite something 10 years ago, but in keeping with Indian hotel tradition, hadn’t been cleaned or maintained since. The room we were put in had minimal air-conditioning and a fan that sounded like a Spitfire. Rather than moving us to another room (of which there were hundreds free) we had to wait an hour while they buggered about trying to fix things. Then they moved us to another room. Which was a little better. Only with no hot water. We gave up, ordered room service and went to bed. The room service poisoned Rachel and she was quite severely unwell for the next 24 hours. We decided to leave the next morning. We drove up to Bikaner fort, but it was swamped by Indian teenage boys on some sort of trip who kept trying to take photos of Rachel. In her poison weakened state, this got on her nerves. To say the least. The fort wasn’t open for another hour, it wasn’t reckoned that highly by Lonely Planet and AFFS had well and truly set in, so, at the driver’s instigation, we set off to Mandawa, a small town that would break the ten hour drive between Bikaner and Delhi. On the way, we stopped at Deshnok to see the Karni Matar Temple – according to legend, rats in this place are the souls of storytellers and are thus revered. So the entire temple is given over to the worship of rats. As you might imagine, it’s a bit smelly in there. It’s supposed to be lucky if you see a white rat. We nearly saw an orange rat as one ran within range of Rachel’s first jet of vomit.

Rats!

Our last night in Rajasthan was spent in Mandawa, a small and very muddy town that, we had been promised, would make the following day’s return trip to Delhi much shorter. The hotel was a old Haveli – a large and somewhat stately house brightly painted. It was truly beautiful, with only one initial problem – the room we were given at first was one of the more impressive original ground floor rooms – large and interesting and fabulously decorated. Unfortunately, the bathroom was also old and Rachel, who planned to spend a lot of time in there with her stomach upset, balked at its condition. Consequently we chose a newer upper floor room that was less interesting but had a cleaner bathroom. That afternoon I ventured into the streets to find a chemist, but discovered that without the name of a drug, the chemist could only offer Indian medicine which I was told, in no uncertain terms, was no good for westerners. I tried a doctor too, but he (in his office that looked like the back room of a long abandoned newsagents) refused to do anything until he had examined Rachel – fair enough except she wasn’t well enough to leave the bathroom. So she just had to sleep it off, which she did with admirably little fuss.

Haveli hotel Mandawa

Interior courtyard

The next day we returned to Delhi. We had decided to stay in our original hotel, but in their best room (at a princely sum of about fifty quid) so Rachel could have a bath rather than a shower. She was feeling a lot better by this point, so we ate at the hotel restaurant, which was exceptionally good, and completely failed to get an early night in preparation for our 3.30am start to travel to Coimbatore the following day. It was our last night in Northern India – over all we had enjoyed our time there very much, but were looking forward to two weeks of indolence, sunshine and a complete absence of forts, palaces and temples.