Jodhpur
INDIA
The Blue City
By AARON
Wednesday, June 29, 2011
What’s the best thing about a 6 hour layover in Jaipur? The breakfast buffet at Country Inn and Suites, that’s what.
My first experience with this buffet was driving a U-haul up to my parent’s house in Maryland where, due to fatigue, I was forced to pull over somewhere outside of Knoxville, Tennessee. Waking up hungry and in the parking lot of a Country Inn and Suites, I marched in as if I owned the place and helped myself to their glorious buffet. No free buffet this time, but Lyndi and I quickly found ourselves looking for a good breakfast, and although we were charged about $8USD/pp for this buffet, it was money well spent.
So after gorging ourselves for about an hour on homemade omelets, fresh bread and juices, we went downstairs to the lobby where we enjoyed a nap for about 2 hours until one of the workers caught on and pleasantly kicked us out. No worries, by then it was about 10am, and we had to catch our second train to Jodhpur, also known as “The Blue City”.
By now you must be seeing a trend: Pink City, Golden City, Blue City, etc. Jodhpur is called the “Blue City” because yep, you guessed it, many of the houses and buildings are painted blue. Originally painted blue to keep flies and mosquitoes away, it also cools the houses in the depressingly hot summer days that seem to hang over the state of Rajasthan like a heavy blanket. Arriving at around 6pm, we took a moto-taxi to Cozy Guest House and enjoyed the cool a/c of our clean room.
Next morning was laundry day, and after two long train rides through sand-ridden countryside, I was forced to wash everything twice. The water was literally running blackish/brown from my clothes – even those that I donned for less than 12 hours. Sick.
After laundry, we headed up to the main attraction of Jodhpur: Mehrangarh Fort which was one of the main forts for the Moghul Empire and also one of the largest forts in India. Built on top of a high, rocky plateau, the fort itself seems to blend in naturally to the rock formation it sits on, and for as long as it has stood, no enemy has ever breached the walls of this impressive stronghold.
The entrance fee at first made us hyperventilate a bit (Rp 350), but it included an audio tour that was more than impressive and gave us so much more insight to the history of the fort and its previous rulers. By far the best “fort tour” we’ve done so far in India, and we would be hard-pressed to find a better one with equally amazing views.
After our tour of Mehrangarh, we decided to eat at another restaurant, considering the food at Cosy Guest house was pretty appalling. Walking again through narrow streets filled with cows, dogs, trash, bikes, scooters, moto-taxis, cars and people, we were relieved when we finally found Nirvana café and avoiding the chaos, if at least for an hour or two, enjoyed a nice meal at a good price.
Next morning we decided to pay for an extra night accommodation because our train didn’t leave Jodhpur until 11pm, so to pass some of the time we took a tour out to a local village that made carpets by hand.
Badly wanting one of the carpets that we had seen in Agra, we were a bit disappointed when we arrived and found out that these were in fact “Durrie” carpets, made of camel hair and not anything like the hand-woven wool carpets we saw in Agra. So with an awkward goodbye we left empty-handed and headed back to the city carpetless. The rest of the day was spent enjoying the air-conditioning in our room and also having some beers on the rooftop patio.
Well, that’s pretty much it for Jodhpur. By a long shot not my best work, but to be honest I’m just trying to knock this out before we meet some friends of ours and go trounce around Kuala Lumpur. I promise I’ll put a bit more effort into the next one and blow your freakin’ mind.
Here’s a fun fact though – Lyndi got pooped on by a pigeon. Again. And this won’t be the last time…
