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Published: April 11th 2013
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Klaudia and I have traveled somewhat extensively in North Africa – we even honeymooned in Tunisia. Personally, I’m not a big fan after all of it; and Jaisalmer had that atmosphere exactly.
We’ve come to learn that you need to take what other travelers say about places with a grain of salt: bias, perception and the experience of a place vary across all people, further affected by the events that occur in that place. An incident such as getting your foot run over by a tuk-tuk driver will dramatically change the way you feel about a place; what is dirty for one person, may be cleaner for another; getting extraordinarily hassled in a place is not going to help your opinion of it. So, as someone who is very biased about things, I readily admit that the same is true of my opinions: what I hate, you may like.
With that, Jaisalmer was probably the low point of our Indian experience: the people were rude, Jaisalmer fort was cool, but – let’s be honest – how many forts can you see before you’ve had enough; the food was awful; and it was dreadfully hot. We
just didn’t like the vibe of the whole place; I’d say that perhaps we’re not desert people, but we camp in the desert all the time. Maybe the desert was just not that unique – coupled with bad experiences with the locals, we had no desire to stay and took off the same day.
Before we left though, we obviously visited Jaisalmer Fort, which is a living one – it was interesting to glimpse how it functioned so many centuries ago. It was fun to get lost in the narrow, winding streets, and we walked in circles for a bit around the fort museum.
And what about the ever-so-popular camel safari out into the desert? Every tourist does it… Yeah, we booked it after haggling a half hour with the hotel proprietor who also doubled as a travel agent, but then canceled it.
Ok, so he sold me, and I knew he sold me when we were done: we’d negotiated him down about 70%, including two nights free in our hotel, which sounds good at first, but the fact that I had to go to all that trouble to get him
there, should have been a red flag to me. But, though a bit forceful, his salesmanship was impressive. Also, we were to join a group with a Polish and English couple, which was an additional selling point. He cantankerously requested us not to tell the others in the group the price we’d paid while we were on the safari, as we were getting an impeccable deal. We gave him a deposit for 50% because we didn’t have the whole amount, explaining that we’d go to an ATM. He ripped the money out of my hands, then ordered a little henchman to go along with us to collect the cash as soon as we’d pulled it out of the ATM. I looked at him and laughed: there’s so much the Indians just do not understand about customer service, and as a developing country, they have a long way to go. Plus, it was such a North African thing to do. The henchman guided us to an ATM – it didn’t work. We tried another, which was also malfunctioning, and the henchman gave up. We told him we’d pay later.
As we were visiting the fort, we started to
talk about the safari in general.
“If you want to go, we’ll go,” Klaudia kept repeating.
We went to a travel bureau recommended by Lonely Planet and found a comparable price, with no haggling or hassle. So, we weren’t overpaying, but the fact that his initial price was so much higher began to irk me.
“You know, we did this whole camel safari thing in Tunisia: I can’t imagine it’ll be that different,” I said to Klaudia.
“Yep.”
“I’ve done it in Morocco as well, and ended up sniffing camel farts for two days, then ate camel shit,” I added.
“Probably won’t be much different than that, except for the camel shit part.”
“Let’s screw it, huh?” I said.
“Up to you...”
“Yea, let’s get out here. I think getting our money back will be an issue though…”
Our proprietor had obviously disappeared for the day, but his brother was there. Long story short, we got our money back after much argument. But, the truth of the matter was that
we couldn’t pay the other 50% because the ATM didn’t work, and we weren’t going to put any more effort into procuring cash, such as scouring the town for an ATM that did work. He and his brother weren’t worth it. And we were already sick of Jaisalmer – we were leaving.
We ended up giving him 100 rupees for our baggage storage and his trouble, and left. We went to the bus station and got on a bus to Jaipur. I looked at my ticket, where the destination was written in Hindi. It all looks weird to me, but something was wrong with the image of the city name when compared to the Hindi for Jaipur written on a street sign I noticed. The bus was on its way when I asked some Korean tourist if this bus was going to Jaipur.
“I don’t know,” they answered. You don’t know? Where are you going? I didn’t have time to deal with them and walked over to the attendant.
“Where is this bus going?” I inquired.
“Udaipur.”
“Udaipur?! I wanted Jaipur!” I exclaimed.
We hecticly got off the bus. The attendant told us to wait where we were and that he’d shortly return.
“Umm… ok,” I said. Klaudia shook her head tiredly.
A few minutes later, he came back on a motorcycle and I wondered where he’d got it. I mean, he was just collecting cash on a bus a moment ago…
“Is that your motorcycle?” I asked him.
“Yes.”
“Nice bike.” It was a beat-up Honda Hero. "Where did it come from? Was it on the bus?" I asked, receiving nothing but a head bobble in response.
He found us a tuk-tuk, and we returned to the bus station to wait for the correct bus. I had a beer or two near the station… “Don’t listen to other travelers,” I thought to myself as I drank. Someone in Goa had told me that I wouldn’t find any beer in Rajasthan.
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