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Published: April 18th 2008
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And so on to Jodhpur, the second largest city in Rajasthan. Another long drive and we arrived at our next hotel which turned out to be one of the nicer ones of the tour and a great relief after the Jaiselmer distaster!
Jodhpur has a fort (now there's a surprise!) on the top of the hill called Meherangarh Fort. We were dropped at the entrance where we picked up audio guides and it was actually really good to be able to go around the fort at your own speed listening to the plummy Indian accented audio tour guide. The walls of the fort surround the oldest part of the city dating back to 1450ish and the entrance has huge gates with scary spikes and right angle turns to prevent elephants being used to break their way through. There are actually a series of 7 gate so it was pretty impregnable. The fort palace has courtyards and balastrades all highly decorated by carvings and paintings. From the very top you can look out across the city, most of the buildings of which are painted blue. This is where my camera died, either through battery trauma or over heating (it was about
40 degrees!) so I didn't get any photos of the blue city. I'm hoping some of my fellow travellers will take pity and email me a few. Either that or I will have to get to grip with facebook as they are all on there!
Audio tour over we walked back down through the back streets and alleyways into the main market square. No touristy shops here - pure cart-boot sale as Jen dubbed it. We ended up at the famous lassi bar (banana lassi has become my favourite drink while in Nepal and India), but after my Delly belly the previous day I gave this gloopy version a miss. The others all tucked in. It looked like custard - not quite the white frothy lassi I'd got used to.
The group then split, some staying in town to then walk over to a restaurant we'd planned to meet at a called On the Rocks while the rest of us went back to the hotel to relax and meet up later. So eventually we roll up (via a tuk tuk who's driver said he would wait for us - yeah right!) at On the Rocks - just me,
Morvan and Matt and find its a really funky, weird, fun kind of place but with no sign of the others in the courtyard area or in the dark, african styled bar area. We decided they had probably given up on the long walk and stopped somewhere elso on the way so after G and Ts at the bar had our meal. This is when the music started up in the bar and Morvan went to check it out on her way to the toilets. When she came back she was full of how huge the place was further into the bar area and that there was a dance floor and a load people there dancing. That was it - in we went for a spot of people watching only to find that the dance floor had suddenly emptied. That didn't stop us - and with flourescent lighting making our teeth and eyes and white clothing making us look really freaky we had a hilarious time amusing the locals left in the bar. We were joined later by an Indian family who were really going for it. They had a little tiny kiddie of about two and instead of dancing
round hand-bags we ended up dancing round small child! It was well past eleven by the time we left (late for here!) and we nearly fell over in shock as our tuk tuk driver came over to take us back. He'd waited well over an hour longer than we'd said we'd be. Then it was back to the hotel where we found the others who had just got back from - On the Rocks! It was bigger than either group had thought - they had avoided the bad music and so didn't see us making fools of ourselves on the dance floor. And so to bed. Another long drive in the morning.
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