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Published: October 28th 2017
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The next part of our Indian adventure took us to the state of Rajasthan. We covered a lot of distance here getting between Jaipur, Jaisalmer, Jodhpur and Udaipur before heading onto Mumbai from there.
Looking back on our time in Rajasthan I'm not sure any of the cities really stood out as an overwhelming favourite but they all had their good parts and fair share of odd things as well!
Jaipur, The Pink City, was our first stop and we decided the first day of being there we would have a bit of a cheat day and headed to The World Trade Park mall and ended up walking around enjoy the A/C and watching a film - The Kingsman: The Golden Circle - it couldn't really get more English than that! We had to stand for the Indian national anthem before the film started and they stopped the film half way through for an intermission. We spent the next day walking around the colourful old city with its 'pink' (it was probably more terracotta) buildings and colourful markets and we did manage to see some monkeys roaming the roof tops as per the BBC's Planet Earth series. The monkeys
were out in force the next morning as we headed to the Monkey Temple, which looked as though it could have been used for a level of the game Tomb Raider, and they were swarming round the locals who were armed with bananas! It was also in Jaipur that we saw a man getting a tooth pulled by another man in a bus stop with a pair of rusty pliers...needless to say we didn't hang around to see the outcome, and a camel pulling a trailer of goods through a busy main road amongst all the other traffic!
From Jaipur we headed to Jaisalmer which is out in the west of Rajasthan near the desert. We stayed at a place called Arya Haveli which was good because they had a communal area on the rooftop where you could relax. Up till then if we've wanted to relax we've had to do it in our room which makes meeting others a bit trickier. It was here we met Pauline, Danny and Mark - an Aussie, Dutch and a Kiwi respectively! We spent a lot of time on the rooftop with them drinking beers, eating, chatting and taking shelter from the
heat! Jaisalmer itself was very small, a maze of little shops and despite the small streets you still found yourself having to dodge speeding mopeds more often than you'd think - imagine walking through the South Laines in Brighton and getting beeped at by someone buzzing round the corner on a moped continuously until you have your back to the wall to let them past! It here that we went on a sunset camel safari which involved Julia riding a camel called Michael Jackson and myself Jonnie Walker for about an hour in the Thar desert until we reached the sand dunes. I can't say it was the most comfortable mode of transport we've taken on the trip so far and the getting up and down at the beginning and end is very much like being on the bucking bronco. The dunes were really impressive and we stayed there until the sun went down - I even managed to lose my phone and retrieve it by retracing our footsteps in the sand which was a relief! When we got back we had more beers with the others and I shared some whisky with the owners brother as a reward for
opening the bottle for him before he told me he'd lost 30,000 rupees spot betting on cricket and telling me the game India had recently just lost to Australia was fixed! Surely every game they lose can't be fixed - that would seem a little too convenient!
The Blue City, Jodhpur was next and we met up with Agnes and Erik, a Swedish couple we'd met briefly in Agra but had since met for dinner in Jaipur, for breakfast. They were leaving that afternoon but gave us some tips for our time there. From the rooftop of our hostel we had a great view of the Mehrangarh Fort overlooking the city so we headed up there to explore. Of all the forts we've seen this was our favourite as it wasn't as symmetrical as a lot of the other forts we'd seen already. A lot of the places we've been to once you get in the gardens and buildings within the grounds have tended to be very symmetrical so once you've seen a little bit of it it sort of feels like you've seen it all - it was also free to walk around as well! We visited a
spice shop where the guy told us how he'd worked with Mr Sainsbury and let us try some saffron tea before recommending a clothes shop to visit which we later stumbled upon. The guy appeared friendly enough so we ventured inside his shop and listened intently as he went through his well rehearsed sales patter! First of all he started off by asking us if we knew the reasons behind the questions that all Indian shop keepers ask whenever you visit a shop and when we looked blankly at him he explained as follows:
•
Where are you from? So if you tell them you are from the UK he can tell you that he sells to designers in London etc. •
What hotel are you staying at? So they can see how much money you have to spend. •
How long do you have in India? So they can determine how long you might be spending in that city and whether you have time to come back if he sells you the fake stuff! The right answers to give to these questions apparently are: you've been volunteering in Mumbai for 3 years, you’re staying near the fort
l (this is India there is a fort everywhere!), and you don’t know when you’re leaving yet.
He also gave us a test on whether we could tell the difference between cashmere wool and fake cashmere. We obviously failed miserably and the demonstration involved him burning a bit of the fake one and it stinking of plastic, then pouring water onto one of the genuine cashmere scarves. Cashmere, of course, doesn’t absorb water so it all just stayed on the surface until they poured it off. It was actually quite interesting, he didn't put any pressure on us to buy anything and we left feeling educated! From Jodphur we took a bus down to Udaipur where we spent a day before catching an overnight train down to Mumbai. We dropped our bags off at the station cloak room and went in search of a swimming pool where we could chill out for a bit. We ended up in Hotel Udaigur and when we got up to the rooftop the view of the lake was stunning! The hotel in the middle of the lake was also used in the James Bond film Octopussy, which seemed to be showing at a number of restaurants / bars in the area on a nightly basis! It was nice just to take the day to chill out and recharge the batteries and I think if we were to come back then It would be nice to spend a bit more time exploring Udaipur.
After a couple of weeks being on the move I think we were both looking forward to getting down to Mumbai and then the beaches of Goa.
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