Like arid areas the world over, Rajasthan is suffering from prolonged periods of drought, and the last two monsoons have been exceptionally poor. Fortunately, predictions are that this year should be much better. I imagine people are counting the days before the life-giving rain sweeps in from the east. The arrival of monsoon in Rajasthan must be magical.
Deciding to save Udaipur for another visit, we piled on to a creaky government bus and headed north to Jodhpur, the Blue City on the edge of the Thar Desert. We soon learned that on a summer’s day in Rajasthan, it’s best to keep the bus windows closed. Air blowing in through the windows brings no relief – just dust and a relentless hot wind.
Seven hours later we’re on an auto-rickshaw winding through the ultra-narrow streets of Jodhpur’s walled old city, too tight for anything car-sized to pass through but jammed with a disorderly array of rickshaws, scooters, cows and pedestrians. The roads are hemmed in by endless shops selling silver and gold, handicrafts, textiles and sweets, and by elegant but slowly-decaying havelis (ornate multi-level houses) with intricate balconies and latticed window screens carved from stone. Late afternoon we arrive at our guesthouse, which is 500 years old and washed in the vivid indigo paint which creates Jodhpur’s characteristic blue appearance when seen from above.
Jodhpur is instantly enrapturing. The maze of alleyways and the sprawling bazaars, overlooked by an immense and ancient fort have this wonderful, storybook exoticness about them. From the top floor restaurant of our guesthouse we imagine swordsmen and thieves dancing on the rooftops.
And Jodhpur’s Mehrangarh Fort must be one of the most stunning creations in India, set high above the city on a towering rocky perch. The day we visit the fort happens to be the day of Jodhpur’s foundation, and the local government has declared that everyone can visit the fort for free (even us foreigners, who are used to being charged several times more for admission to almost every worthwhile attraction in India). Inside the fort we admire intricate architecture, opulent palaces and sweeping city views from the cannon-lined ramparts.
Although there’s some hassle from the commission touts near the bazaar, and we had an incident where a teenage boy went for a sneaky chest grope (he was loudly and angrily told off by me and Ben as well as all his mates, but realistically his mates probably thought he did a great job), Jodhpur struck us both as an exceptionally friendly and enjoyable city. It would have been easy to spend days exploring the city from corner to corner, but the 45 degree heat made wandering around extremely tiring.
Despite the heat, we decided to take a one day camel safari from Osiyan, a little city in the Thar Desert, 60km from Jodhpur. Neither of us had ridden camels before – Ben hasn’t even been on a horse. We each received our own camel and camel driver, and we marched for several hours over the parched landscape, rocking back and forth (slightly uncomfortable at first – I’ve heard it takes a few solid days of riding to really get used to it) in time with the camel’s tall, jaunty gait. Away from the road and among the sand dunes, we experience India at its most silent, with only the calls of doves, wild peacocks and insects echoing in the empty desert. Still, every now and then we’d come across a tiny settlement of mud huts with thatched roofs. We’re astonished that people can eke out a living here, with seemingly no food or water for miles. The same sort of environment in Australia would be completely vacant of any human habitation, but in India, people have established themselves here for reasons we haven’t been able to decipher, and somehow survived.
Our camels lived up to their charming reputations, frequently disobeying their young drivers commands, straying from the trail to eat hard, spiky plants and animal bones (does anyone know why they do this?), and groaning, farting and pissing loudly. At one point Ben’s ten year old camel driver, sitting behind him, somehow managed to fall asleep still holding the reins. The camel quickly figured this out and started to wander off the track in search of more bones to eat. Eventually Ben prodded the boy awake and we continued on towards the camel drivers’ village.
Arriving at the family home of the camel drivers, we hung about in the courtyard for a few hours until after sunset. Surprisingly, some large clouds carrying a few piddling drops of rain came over obscuring the sun a little and ensuring we couldn’t admire the famous desert starscape. Still, we were treated to a genuine Rajasthani thali dinner, with three kinds of vegetables, a tangy curd curry, rice, and millet chapattis – one of the most outstanding meals we’ve had in all of India, eaten all mixed together with our hands, of course.
We had six litres of water with us, boiling hot of course, and we finished all of this in a couple of hours. If you’re unused to desert conditions, the dry air makes you feel continuously, desperately thirsty, and no matter how much you drink, your mouth and throat feel almost chokingly parched. The first mouthful of cold soft drink in the car on the way back to Jodhpur was ridiculously gratifying.
The guide/driver we hired to take to Osiyan and back was reasonably unique among Indian drivers-for-hire in that he had an actual drivers license that he acquired by perfectly legal means (ie, actually completing, and passing, the driver test). Originally from the desert himself (his family hut was once blown away in a whirling dust devil), he explained that he had been ferrying tourists around for years without a license until a kindly Australian woman gave him the funds to take the test. By our standards, his driving was still woeful, but it was a visible improvement on just about every other driver we’ve had. We were glad to have him, because it was well after dark when we set off back to Jodhpur, and we were caught in the middle of what seemed to be a moderately severe sandstorm (“normal”, our driver said), which reduced the visibility to a couple of metres at best. Without his judicious use of high beams and hazard lights, and his lack of obsession with relentlessly overtaking every vehicle in sight, our drive back to the air conditioned safety of our guesthouse would have been a much more stressful affair.
