Jodhpur - the blue city

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After the spiritual Pushkar, we decided to go to Jodhpur the famous blue city. We took a local bus at 7am and I (Maite) could enjoy for the first time a real Indian bus experience. I was a bit disappointed to not be jointed by chickens in the bus, but yes it was busy… and Indians can be just as busy as chickens. My posterior could feel the bumps of the road but I was nicely protected by Hugo from the elbows of people standing in the bus (as well as from the incoherent comments, as the one that he should shave from an old bearded and turban wearing man).

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Jodhpur also provided our first rain experience. Until now we never thought that we should worry about the weather forecast, good 20-25C and Rajasthan is just standing at the feet of a desert. It wasn’t a tropical rain but just enough for us to decide to postpone to the next day the visit of the fabulous fort and just wonder around the blue city and get the essentials arranged, e.g. train/ bus tickets, etc. Hugo took the opportunity to get shaved and hair cut for less than 2 euros (off course you need to follow the advice elders give to you especially when they wear a turban). And with the same illusion of price dumping, we went to visit gold jewelry stores, unfortunately we were told that the gold rate was quite high and after some crying, begging and screaming of Maite we ran away to take comfort in a nice Indian meal at our rooftop terrace. Where some beers needed to be ordered as well to get over the second disappointment as there was no meat served and this was now the 4^th night in a row that we didn’t get any meat! (please don’t spring in action right now to get meat send over as trust me when I tell you we made up for it in Udaipur). At the rooftop we had dinner and some nice, although sometimes a bit weird (“zweverig”) conversations with our fellow travelers around a camp fire. Yes I know it sounds strange, camp fire on the roof, but that was exactly what we thought when they started the fire on the rooftop, luckily we woke up the next day to find out there was no fire damage….

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The next morning we packed our bags and started the day with a quick strong rain shower on our way to the fort. Luckily for us it was over quickly and could enjoy the rest of our visit to the second best fort in Rajasthan dry and at the end even sunny. The fort was really great with a superb audio tour which was quite informative. When you look at the pictures you will find one of a taj mahal like structure, this is yet again a baby taj build by one of the kings for his wife (he only had a whole in the ground). It seems sometimes that they call everything which is of white marble and looks closely similar a baby taj, so as you can imagine it was good enough for us to have a look via the telelens of the camera as all these baby taj can never top the real thing. Now it was off again to the bus station for yet another crazy bus ride to Udaipur… to be continued…