Subject: Jodhpur, Jaisalmer, Pt. 1: The Blue City
Date: Fri Jan 17, 2003

After our long, relaxing layover in the tourist haven of Pushkar, Jenny and I at last felt it was time to get back into India. Jenny especially was a bit nervous about it. Yes, Pushkar had been nice, but now we were headed back into that great beast that had made her feel so lonely and exhausted during our first month here. Would we be plunging back into that same grind?

Having been here before, I knew that western Rajasthan would be a very different experience from the jangling chaos of Varanasi, the mediocrity of Orchha and Gwalior, and the big-city, big-tourism pressure of what is called the Golden Triangle of Delhi, Agra and Jaipur. For one thing, the cities are smaller. Jodhpur is the biggest of them, with a population of about 750,000; Jaisalmer is really just a grandiose village in the desert. But it was more than that. I couldn't remember what exactly had been so different, but I knew that in western Rajasthan I had felt India opening up to me, and I hoped Jenny would have a similar experience.

Jodhpur was our first destination after Pushkar. I'd been before in 1998, but I hadn't enjoyed it, and here's why. That time I'd been in Jaisalmer first, and while there I'd gone to the bank to withdraw some money on my credit card. In the process, I'd taken my passport out of my money belt; when I returned exhausted to my hotel, I simply tossed the passport and money belt under my mattress. The next morning I reached under the mattress, took my money belt, and left Jaisalmer for Jodhpur. When I got there, I was horrified to discover that my passport wasn't with me.

My travel partner, a Faroese woman named Bjorg, saved the day. She remembered the name of the hotel where two French friends of ours were staying, managed to ring them up, left a detailed message with the hotel manager. Miraculously, the message got to the French women and they found my passport and they found us in Jodhpur and all was well, and I didn't have to spend three weeks in Delhi trying to get a new Indian visa. Still, Jodhpur remained in my memory no more than a blur of fort and an overwhelming sense of my own idiocy.

I looked forward to giving Jodhpur a second chance. Perched on the edge of the Great Thar Desert, it's dominated by the gigantic Meherangarh Fort, which looms imposingly atop a craggy thrust of sandstone. All around Meherangarh is the Old City of Jodhpur, known as the Blue City because of the tradition of painting the houses of Brahmins with indigo. (By now the tradition has spread to other castes.) The blue varies in shade from powder to Columbia to a deep indigo, and many of the buildings have green doors and windows. Intermixed with the blue buildings are constructions in the yellow and ochre sandstone of the region. From the rooftop of our hotel in the old city, we could look out on this sea of exquisite color and watch the sun set behind the fort.

Even though it's hard to get through Western Rajasthan without visiting Jodhpur, it doesn't get all that many foreign tourists. The smiles and hellos we received were largely out of curiosity, not an attempt to sell us anything. Even on the road leading down from the fort, the town's most obvious tourist attraction, no one tried to sell us anything more exotic than mineral water. Thus Jodhpur is a marvelous town to walk around in. The streets of the Old City wander and weave past exquisite old buildings; astonishingly picturesque tableaux in blue and ochre await around every bend. The pleasure is increased by the bright colors of the Rajasthanis themselves. The women adorn themselves in great bolts of shocking pink, bright orange, electric green, and even the men get into it with their tie-died turbans.

Our hotel added to the experience. Built in the style of an old haveli (a Rajasthani mansion, pronounced ha-vay-lee) and decorated with beautiful local textile work, its best feature is the window seats on the front rooms. We could sit outside in the mornings and afternoons on our cushioned, pillared seat, play a game of chess, and gaze up through our arched windows to look at the fort. "Still there?" Jenny would ask. "Still there," I would confirm.

As we prepared to leave after lingering a few days, Jenny told me that this was the first place in India in which she'd genuinely enjoyed herself without reservations (other than Pushkar, which hardly counts). "Just wait," I told her. "Jaisalmer is even better."

"How is it better?" she asked.

"Um ... I can't remember exactly. It just is." I hoped I was right.

*

Tune in next time to hear how I was turned inside out in Jaisalmer!

Still here,
Josh

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"Nothing in the country is ever quite what you expect, and the only thing to expect is the unexpected which comes in many forms and will always want to sit next to you." - Lonely Planet India

Subject: Jodhpur, Jaisalmer pt. 2: Getting There is Half the Fun
Date: Fri Jan 24, 2003

Once you get out to western Rajasthan, transport gets problematic. There used to be flights out to Jaisalmer -- the last serious town before you reach the Pakistani border --but those have been suspended indefinitely. You can take the train from Jodhpur to Jaisalmer, but it only runs at night, which would have been just ridiculously cold. (North India is currently in the midst of an unusual and deadly cold snap.) You can hire a private car, but that's expensive. The remaining alternative, of course, is the bus.

Presumably most of you have ridden a long-distance bus at one time or another in your home country: the US, New Zealand, Korea, whatever. Indian buses are not like that. Yes, they have a fixed number of seats, and if you buy a ticket, you get a seat. The twist is that you can get on pretty much anywhere along the route and stand in the aisle for a negotiated price to some other point along the route. Again, this seems reasonable enough at first. Unlike the fixed number of seats, however, there is no obvious limiting factor to the number of people who can crowd into the aisle, or the sizes and quantities of bundles they can bring aboard. At one point on our return trip from Jaisalmer, an entire village got on board. I'm not joking or exaggerating. Granted it was a small desert village, but the aisle was already packed when the swarm of men in turbans and dhotis, women in saris and gold jewelry, and hordes of children all climbed aboard and pretty much sat all over the people in the aisle seats. The experience is not improved by the state of the roads, which vary from bumpy to hellish. You might think that the buses here don't have shocks, but in fact they offer severe shocks every few seconds. A lengthy bus ride is synonymous with internal damage.

For our trip from Jodhpur to Jaisalmer, we took our hotelier's advice and went on the 6 am bus because it was supposedly newer and better. What this meant was that the TV and VCR were in perfect working order. The very loud, very bad Hindi movie began as soon as the bus departed, which ruled out any sleep. To make matters worse, our hotelier had gone out of his way to get us the very front seats, which are considered auspicious for reasons that elude me. It's true that they allow you to see your approaching near-death out the front window as the driver veers into oncoming traffic to pass trucks, horse carts, motorcycles, camels, etc. But they have absolutely no leg room, and whenever crowds of people climb on to ride in the aisle, they dump their luggage on you as they get situated. Plus, of course, the movie up there is painfully loud and impossible to ignore.

Needless to say, we were not at our best when we arrived in Jaisalmer. Still, we managed to find our way to a hotel in a marvelous 500-year-old haveli (mansion). I asked for a room with attached bath, and the man showed me first a bedroom, then a bathroom down the hall. "No, no, no," I said, "attached bath." The man gestured at the bedroom, the adjoining sitting room, the bathroom. "This all one room!" he explained. We had a giant suite to ourselves just inside the walls of the fort, all for a mere $12 a night -- steep by Rajasthani standards, but how often do you get to stay in a bit of fairytale history?

Unfortunately, I came to rue that long, long hallway to the toilet. But that's a story for next time, and you probably shouldn't read it while you're eating.

-Josh

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"Nothing in the country is ever quite what you expect, and the only thing to expect is the unexpected which comes in many forms and will always want to sit next to you." - Lonely Planet India

Subject: Jodhpur, Jaisalmer pt. 3: The Vagabond Pukes
Date: Sun Jan 26, 2003 3:54pm

A warning: This piece is gross. It's about bodily functions. You probably shouldn't read this over breakfast.

*

There is an illness which is quaintly known as "traveler's diarrhea." This name is not nearly squalid and horrible enough. The word "travelers" makes me think of specially designed wallets, or else very tan people swapping tales over drinks. I do not think of the nightmarish misery I experienced that first night in Jaisalmer.

As we ate our Italian dinner and watched the sunset on the ramparts of the fort (Jaisalmer's fort is actually a city within a city), I began to feel the cold closing in on me; by the time we got the check, I couldn't stop shivering. Granted it was genuinely chilly, but this was odd, especially because Jenny wasn't cold at all. She's usually the chilly one between the two of us. By the time we got back to the hotel, I was feeling bleary and headachy, but I assumed it was just mild hypothermia. I stood by our hotelier's campfire in the street outside and it warmed me some, but still I didn't feel right.

Back inside, I just couldn't get warm, even fully dressed under three wool blankets. At times the shivering would taper off, and then I would feel cold inside but hot on the surface, like my face was flushed. And then with a sudden blast I was hit with an incredible wave of simultaneous cold, shivering, ill feeling and intense paranoia. "I'm really scared," I told Jenny. She reached out to comfort me, but jerked her hand back when she touched me. My skin was burning. When we took my temperature, it was 103.1 (39.5 C).

Not long after that, the diarrhea and vomiting began. It was that horrible situation where you're not sure which end to put on the toilet first. According to our Little Red Book of Doom (the mountain and wilderness survival manual we picked up in Nepal), these were all the symptoms of bacterial diarrhea. Unfortunately, they were also most of the symptoms of malaria. As I lay in bed between trips to the bathroom, I had the paranoid thought that I shouldn't fall asleep, as it might be a malarial fever coma.

Needless to say, it was a long and awful night. In my fevered imagination I began to rue triangles, of all things: the triangular area of my abdomen where I would feel the stab of pain that meant I had to wake up and trudge to the bathroom again; the triangle formed by my bed, the hook where my jacket was hanging, and my slippers; and the triangle formed by the bedroom, the corner by the hallway, and the bathroom far, far away. The giant hotel suite that had seemed so exciting that morning now felt like a kind of torture device.

By a few hours into this ordeal, I had excreted or vomited everything I could possibly imagine might have been in my digestive tract, and I hoped I would at last be able to rest. No dice. Instead I began to shit water, and now I was worried about dehydration. The Tylenol and Imodium I'd managed to keep down hadn't broken the fever or stopped the flow. It was only around 8 the next morning that I was finally able to collapse into real sleep, which was only interrupted every hour or two.

When I woke up again at 2 the next afternoon, I was feeling somewhat better. By now we'd worked out that it wasn't malaria, but I still had the fever, so we asked the hotelier to call us a doctor. ("He is not doctor, he is god-man!" our hotelier declared.) India is a country where doctors still make housecalls, and this one cost us a whopping $5 for an entirely competent examination, diagnosis and prescription, including the medicine. We were hugely reassured to hear from a local doctor that I did indeed have what we thought I had -- traveler's diarrhea -- and not some bizarre other thing.

When I had finally recovered enough to have a sense of humor again, I suggested to Jenny that a better name for the illness might be "the vagabond pukes." She suggested "the wandering wastrel upchucks," which is also pretty good. The experience ranks as the worst I've had in all my travels, but at least it was fleeting and quick. After a couple of doses of antibiotics, the fever finally broke, and after another day of rest I was well again. And despite the miseries of the vagabond pukes, Jaisalmer turned out to be our favorite destination so far.

In the next couple of emails I'll tell you what was so good about Jaisalmer, what was so lame about Udaipur, and how to get from there to Bombay overnight without sleeping a wink.

Healthy in Bombay,
Josh

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"Nothing in the country is ever quite what you expect, and the only thing to expect is the unexpected which comes in many forms and will always want to sit next to you." - Lonely Planet India

Subject: Jodhpur, Jaisalmer, Pt. 4: Enough Already! Plus Udaipur and Bombay
Date: Tue Jan 28, 2003

Built of honey-hued sandstone in the midst of the Thar Desert, Jaisalmer is a place that should exist only in a fairy tale. It's a small but opulent city that made its wealth from the rich caravans passing between India and Central Asia, and at its heart is the strange, magnificent, totally improbable fort.

India is full of forts, of course, which can be anything from a wall and a cannon to fabulous palace complexes. But they're usually lifeless government museums -- relics. As far as I know, Jaisalmer Fort is the only one in India that is a living city within a city, where the individual buildings are privately owned by the families who have lived there for generations. It's a Brahmin enclave, and virtually everyone shares the family name Vyas, so there's a close-knit community culture that's different from the opportunistic atmosphere you find in so many other Indian tourist towns.

Jaisalmer's glory may have faded with the closing of the Pakistani border and the decline in the old trade to Central Asia, but the citizens of the fort still form a conservative, educated upper class. When Jenny and I went to family-run "Bobby Heena" to get Ayurvedic massages, facials, manicures and henna work -- well, I got the first two -- the grandfather masseur tried to get me to pay for a palm reading; he assured me it would be worthwhile because he was a Brahmin, "The highest cast in the world!" He also explained that the only reason he still works is to raise money to pay for his daughter's dowries, which will run him close to $8,000 a pop. They're both in their late twenties already, and one of them told Jenny that she was still waiting for a good man. They were very impressed that I cook. They spoke excellent English, too, though they had a disarmingly cute tendency to say things like "Take off your shoeses" or "Put your clotheses over here." And Bobby told Jenny that when men crowd around her or harrass her, she should just slap them. I tend to agree.

But more even than the culture, it's the sheer exuberant beauty of Jaisalmer's architecture that makes it so special. The fort walls undulate with dozens of ramparts, and the buildings are covered in ornate carvings. Deep in the fort are the spectacular Jain temples, which are covered in statues of dancers and gods. And draped over walls in the narrow lanes are gorgeous quilts and tapestries for sale, and brightly colored turbans (I even bought one and learned how to tie it). We were welcomed onto one of the parapets by the propietor of Kila Bhawan, which is a hotel we weren't even staying at. "I just like people, you know?" he explained as he brought us chai and let us gaze out at the fort gates and the maharaja's palace and the city below. And down in the city are still more astonishing buildings, great havelis heaped up upon themselves with domes and arches and peacock carvings, while the people themselves provide vivid splashes of color with their brilliant saris and turbans in lime, saffron, candy-apple, Barbie pink -- yes, there are shocking pink turbans -- and even the men drip with gold jewelry.

*

When you're in Jaisalmer, it's pretty much inevitable that you'll wind up on a camel. I went on a three-day safari five years ago, which involved my saddle falling off the camel while I happened to be sitting in it, and landing me face-down in a thornbush. My camel driver ran up shouting, "Oh no! Saddle broken! Very expensive!" Considering the current cold snap, the charm of camels and their drivers, my recent illness and my past experiences in the desert, I had little desire to do anything so ambitious. But Jenny has a certain penchant for riding on the backs of animals, and she had a Lawrence of Arabia fantasy to fulfill, so we took the wimpy option and did the two-hour safari to the lovely but garbage-littered and overpopulated Sam sand dunes for sunset. During these two hours upon the farting beasts, Jenny somehow managed to accumulate a frightening set of bruises upon her posterior.

We also learned a bit about life in the desert. On the drive out there we'd seen half-heartedly plowed fields in the sand, the crops stunted and withered. For three years there's been no rain. Abdul, our camel driver, told us that all the "goats, sheep, goats" in his village had starved to death; only the camels have been kept alive, because they bring in cash from the tourist trade. On the one hand, I feel bad for the villagers in the desert who are suffering. On the other hand, though, it's the damn desert. There's a drought because it's a desert. That's sort of how deserts work. It reminds me of the news reports we saw from an African capital (I forget which) that had just been destroyed by a volcano. The citizens were actually walking over the thin crust of solid rock above the molten magma and beginning to rebuild. You want to shake these people and shout, "MOVE! For heaven's sake, just move over a couple of miles so you're out of the lava flow!"

*

In Jaisalmer we met a couple from Seattle, Tamiko and Andy, and we've been traveling with them ever since. She's half-Japanese, he's half-Amish, and they're the kind of people we would actually make friends with if we were back home. Like me, Andy quit his dot-com job, and off they went to travel in the East. Sound familiar?

We met up with them again in Jodhpur, and then traveled down to Udaipur, which is known as the Venice of India. This reputation is wildly overstated. Like Pushkar, Udaipur is a white city on a lake, and it's pretty enough from certain angles. But it's a resort town, and resort towns suck unless you're spending the money to stay in the snazzy resorts. And we weren't. Instead we were stuck in the most irritatingly over-touristed enclave we've stayed in yet, where we were constantly hounded by people selling crap we didn't want. All the restaurants show Octopussy every night because about five minutes of it were filmed in Udaipur. Andy even met a shopkeeper who claimed to have sold a dhoti to Roger Moore. Worse yet, there was a continuous wedding in the hotel across from ours, which went on for three days and involved much blasting of Hindipop on their crappy boombox.

India is, in fact, in wedding overdrive right now. For obvious reasons, winter is a good time for weddings: it's cool enough and dry enough for relatives to travel. Usually the weddings taper off by mid-January, but this year there are twice as many as usual, because the astrologers have decided that next year is inauspicious. As such, not a night went by in Udaipur without an Indian brass band marching by in Sgt. Pepper uniforms and creating an unholy ruckus. (In Jodhpur there were weddings too, but at least we were out of earshot. I only saw them when I went out in the evening to buy chocolate and mineral water. One night I saw three at once on the main road. The shopkeeper pointed to the closest one and explained, "Marriage. Brother, sister, marriage." I'm not sure what he meant, but I'm assuming it wasn't *that*.)

The main good thing about Udaipur is that it's the home town of a family of very good artists who own several very good art galleries. Jenny and I bought a small painting and two etchings. Otherwise, we were largely disappointed. Even the city palace was lousy. It's the sort of place William Randolf Hearst and Elvis might have come up with if they'd worked together, full of colored glass and mirrors and bad sparkly things. "See the luxury in which the maharajas lived!" an Indian fellow-tourist cried out to me. If by luxury he means green and red foil, then sure, I saw it.

*

To get from Udaipur to Bombay, you can take an airplane, but that's expensive. Otherwise, you're stuck with two unfortunate options: you can take a train to the miserably filthy and polluted city of Ahmedabad, then wait for a train to take you the rest of the way, stretching the journey to at least 24 hours; or you can take an overnight bus for 16 hours. We opted for the latter, reassured that it was a "sleeper bus."

This was a misnomer. Certainly there was space to lie down -- the four of us actually had our own room at the back -- but one does not sleep by lying across the rear axle of an Indian bus. We bounced, yes. We jiggled. We thumped. We even dozed. But the only real sleep came when the bus was stopped for an hour at some kind of detour. I dreamt that they were rolling the bus onto pontoons to cross a lake. Then I dreamt that we all got out of the bus and looked at the signs; they pointed to Udaipur, to Delhi, to a dozen cities, but not to Bombay. Then we met two young Western travelers who were there as part of "a special program." The young woman told me they would be moving the program soon to Chabad of Marin, which is my family's synagogue back in California. This struck me as such a phenomenal coincidence that we had no choice but to get off the bus and sleep in the travelers' cabin for the night.

Sadly, this dream came to an end when the bus began rolling again. By morning Jenny thought she might have internal injuries. Eventually we were let off the bus three hours late somewhere in the vast northern suburbs of Bombay. From there it was another hour by taxi to reach Colaba, the tourist ghetto, and then another half hour of wandering around trying to find a hotel with two double rooms with attached bath. ("Do you have two double rooms with attached bath?" "Yes. Bath outside.") At last we found a hotel which is called White Pearl on the outside and Gulf Flower on the inside. Since half the streets and monuments in Bombay (Mumbai) have changed their names, this only makes sense. But it was clean, it had a bed, and it even had cable TV.

At long last we were out of Rajasthan. For the next few days, we would gorge ourselves on beef and the Cartoon Network. But that's a story for next time. Not much of a story, maybe, but it'll be better than that email about puking.

-Josh

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"Nothing in the country is ever quite what you expect, and the only thing to expect is the unexpected which comes in many forms and will always want to sit next to you." - Lonely Planet India