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Published: August 3rd 2006
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Desert
Sunrise in the Thar Desert Hi guys,
So I'm in Newark airport, waiting for my flight to Austin and taking advantage of the blissfully fast wireless to bring you guys up to speed.
So after our lovely stay in Jodhpur, Brian, Mona, and I took a sleeper bus through the desert to Jaisalmer. The high point of the bus ride (if one could even call it that) was going through Pokhran, which was where the first nuclear tests done by India were performed under Indira Gandhi's power.
Jaisalmer is a great city in the middle of a dry scrubby desert, and honestly, it looks like an oversized sandcastle to me. Just like Jodhpur, Jaisalmer is dominated by its giant fort, but unlike Jodhpur, the fort is still inhabited. Upon a recommendation from our hotel owner in Jodhpur, we chose to stay at the Ishaar Palace hotel, which is in a 400 year old ramshackle building inside the fort. Turns out Ishaar was a prime minister of Jaisalmer in the 1920s, and Brian and I stayed in his room (for Rs 150 a night! that's three dollars), which sported a great carved stone balcony from which he made proclamations. That night we wandered down the
fort to this Italian restaurant with great food (for India) and fantastic decor. We made it an early night though, since we'd arranged with our hotel for a sunrise camel safari, which started at 4:30 a.m.!
We got up bright and early, had breakfast (which we'd preordered), and climbed in a jeep for a faster-than-a-speeding bullet ride down a road that was occasionally covered in sand dunes. Really, the jeep was only going about 50 mph, but for India, that's flying. They drove us out to some expansive and really prisitine dunes, where our camels shortly joined us. Camels are odd looking animals. I think they're very provocative and sexy, really, from a distance. Up close, they smell, fart often, and mine even had bucked teeth.
The camels were a blast. Mona, Brian, and I each had our own camels, and mine was definitely the alpha male, since I was always in the lead. Brian, feeling a little emasculated, kept getting his camel to trot up near mine, but as soon as my camel realized his had picked up speed, it would break into it's own little trot. Meanwhile, somewhere in the desert distance, we hear Mona telling
her eight or nine year old camel driver, "No! I don't like that!" Brian and I did some good trotting for a while, but camel trotting is a lot bumpier than horse trotting, and we definitely got down off our camels in a nearby village with a bit of jelly legs. We met the jeep in said village after only a couple of hours on the camel (which in hindsight was just perfect). From there I'm not really sure what happened. They took us to a village where nothing really happened other than that we were offered chai and we sat around awkwardly while our guide chatted with a friend of his. Then we went by Jain temples, which we didn't think were particularly impressive, and where we refused to pay Rs 20 to go into a place of worship (of course, that all changed when we got the the Taj Mahal, but that's another story).
Anyway, we returned to Jaisalmer late morning for some shopping before catching the worst train of my life overnight back to Jaipur.
Jaisalmer is a desert. There is a lot of sand. For some reason the mechanics are perfect on a train
that as it speeds through the desert, it pulls the sand into the train car. I tried to nap for a couple of hours (which I couldn't do without a shawl over my nose, eyes, and mouth), and when I woke up there was a definitive dark spot where I had been sleeping, and everything else was covered in a thick layer of sand. I'm still coughing up sand, and I still have a runny nose because my body is trying to expel all the sand I breathed in. So anyway, we finally arrived back in Jaipur after two weeks, where everything is familiar and a pain in the neck.
Until we went to Jodhpur and Jaisalmer, Brian and I didn't understand why so many tourists would come to Rajasthan. Sure, Jaipur has its charming bits (although those aren't always so charming), but overall it's a big city where even the nice parts look like slums in the U.S. and every basic function of daily living from getting to the office to making sure you're well fed is a hassle. And Jaipur's beauty certainly doesn't make up for its faults.
Jodhpur and Jaisalmer, however, dispelled all that ill
More Dunes
From the back of my camel will. Both cities were gorgeous and atmospheric in exactly the way that you'd expect a romantic, ancient India city. In both cities everyone was kind and helpful and though we had to haggle hard for decent prices, we never felt like we really got ripped off. Well, almost. We had one exciting scene in a shawl shop in Jaisalmer, where the guy was trying to pass off a synthetic shawl as pure silk. I knew it wasn't, and I told him so. He got very up in arms, and told me I didn't know what I was talking about. There was a short pause, and then Mona and Brian burst out laughing. I'm not claiming to be a textile expert, but after this many years around fabrics, I know enough that when it feels like plastic, it's not silk. Anyway, the guy had this scheme where he'd put some items out on the street and underprice them to draw customers in, which he did with us. But he was expecting us to by more than just the one piece. He wanted Rs 650 for a two-toned shawl, and when I said Rs 100, he threw us out of the shop,
asking me if I thought I was smarter than he was and blah blah blah. It was obvious that when he thought he might just sell the underpriced item, it wasn't worth it, and he had to get us out of the store. But then he followed us with, "I'll give you Rs 200 for the two-toned). Luckily just next door was a store with better selection and a much kinder and more helpful owner, so we absconded in there for a while to find Mona some more India-appropriate shirts and shome gift items for her.
Anyway, as I said, post shopping we hopped that miserable train to Jaipur, which brings me to my next blog concerning Jaipur and Agra.
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