My stomach was still a bit troublesome the morning of the 24th, so I spent most of the morning at my hotel in Jaisalmer before leaving about noon on the five hour bus trip to Jodhpur. The bus was similar to the one that had brought me to Jaisalmer, with reclining seats and sleeper berths, and like the previous bus was jammed with people. However, I had a window seat and traveled comfortably enough across the desert. Hills began to appear as we approached Jodhpur. I got a hotel among the narrow lanes of the city just below its magnificent fort, and a very comfortable hotel at that, with a great hot shower. The budget hotels here in Rajasthan (I usually pay $8-10 per night) are much better than the often dirty ones in the Himalayas. I walked through the narrow lanes of the city after dark. No cars, but motorcycles and cows.
The next morning I had breakfast in the chilly air on the roof of my hotel, with great views of the towering Mehrangarh Fort on a rocky hill above the city. It is maybe 300 feet above the city and its highest walls are almost 120 feet high, a magnificent fort. My stomach was still being contentious, but I think I willed it to good behavior and I made the steep climb up to the fort about 10:30. I spent the rest of the day up there, touring the palace buildings and looking out over the city from the walls. Jodhpur was founded by a guy named Jodha in the 15th century, though most of the fort is from the 17th century. They say it never was captured in battle. There are cannon ball marks on some of the walls. Near one of the gates are 36 handprints of wives and concubines of a maharaja who died in 1843. They joined him on his funeral pyre by committing sati and this is their memorial. That was the last sati in Jodhpur, as the nefarious British, with their western cultural prejudices, forced the local rulers to abolish that treasured traditional practice.
Down below the fort, many of the houses in the old city are painted blue, and Jodhpur is known as the "Blue City." Apparently, the blue paint repels termites. I walked all around the fort. There were hordes of Indian tourists, outnumbering western tourists by at least 20 to 1, I would guess. It was a Saturday, and in fact Christmas Day, although I've seen absolutely no signs of Christmas anywhere. Near the end of the afternoon I walked down through a second series of gates to another part of the town, which was also filled with blue houses, passing a couple of cows (or rather a cow and a bull as I later found out) just outside the last gate. I turned around and the bull had mounted the cow. It didn't last long but I'm glad that didn't happen as I passed them as a bystander could have been killed by those thrashing bovines. I carefully passed them on the way back up to the fort and wound my way to the other side and my hotel. That night there was another of those traditional Indian wedding groups, with a turbaned groom on a white horse accompanied by light bearers, musicians and men and women, the women in beautiful saris. They were a friendly bunch.
I spent the next morning and early afternoon at the hotel, mostly talking with an Australian who was distraught ("worse day of my life," he said) over Australia's poor performance in the England-Australia cricket competition called the "Ashes," which Australia almost always wins, especially on its home turf. I asked him if he could take five or ten minutes to explain cricket to me, and he said in all seriousness that it would take one or two years to do so. He did explain a lot, and we also talked about Japan, where he has lived for the past eight years. Cricket is on television all the time in India, and is the country's most popular sport.
I had lunch on the roof with a couple of other tourists, then took an autorickshaw to the edge of town and the Umaid Bhawan Palace, built by the maharaja from 1929 to 1943 as a "famine relief project." Seems to me he could have built a hospital instead, or maybe just bought some food. It is somewhat similar to the government buildings in New Delhi and the palace has 347 rooms, about the same as the former Viceregal Palace (now the President's home) in New Delhi. You can only tour a very small part of it. The rest is a very fancy hotel and the living quarters of the current maharaja. I came back to the city center and walked up to the fort and beyond it to the royal cenotaphs, the principal one of white marble and dating from 1899. They are only about ten minutes from the fort. Afterward, I walked down to the bazaars around the British-era clock tower, bought some socks (I had switched from shoes to sandals when I took the train from Ramnagar at the foot of the Himalayas to Delhi, but the cold weather made me switch back to shoes when I left Pushkar), and had the strap on my day pack repaired. The guy at my hotel told me to find a shoe repair guy and have him sew it for me, and that it should cost 5 rupees (about 11 cents). The first guy I talked to wanted 100, the second 50. We settled for 10. The bazaars were quite interesting, with lots of buying and selling and lots of women in colorful clothes. The vendors here are much more pleasant than in Jaisalmer. In fact, I very much like Jodhpur, although it has almost a million people. The narrow lanes under the fort are interesting, with pleasant people. I haven't seen anyone wearing jodhpurs, although in the palace buildings in the fort there were some photos of the maharaja's polo team and I think they were in jodhpurs. At most of the maharaja palaces I've been to here in Rajasthan there have been photos and displays (uniforms and silver cups and mallets and the like) about polo. Every time I see them I think of Ed Norton and his "string of poloponies."
The next morning (today) I had breakfast on the hotel roof with a Welsh novelist (who actually writes his novels, or at least some of them, in Welsh) and his daughter. At 11 I took a bus north to Osiyan, forty miles away and a journey of an hour and a half, to visit some Jain temples there. There were beautiful carvings on the temples, but all in all I found them a little disappointing, especially compared to the Jain temples in Jaisalmer. There were some nice people there, though, including a big contingent of Jains (600 of them) traveling together in buses from Bombay. I got back to Jodhpur about 4:30, walked around the bazaars around the clock tower for a while and then made my way through the cow-clogged lanes to my hotel.
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