Jaisalmer, day 3 of the adventure

After our brief 24 hour stint in Delhi we got on an overnight train and headed all the way out to Jaisalmer, a fort in the Rajastani desert. The fort gets its name from the golden sandstone that it is constructed from and is perched on a high plateau that rises out of the otherwise pancake-flat surroundings. This was definitely one of my favorite places in India, and well worth the trek.

During the train journey I kept seeing dark things go across the aisles out of the corner of my eye, but I figured that I was just seeing things since no one else was alarmed, but about halfway through there were several confirmed rat and roach sightings, so from that point on we were careful not to leave our stuff / feet on the floor to get eaten by the pests. We did kill a few cockroaches, so now their numerous ranks have been depleted, but I’m sure they were busy having babies in the handle of someone’s bag much faster than we were killing them.

We arrived in Jaisalmer around 2 pm the next day, and went with the first person who offered us a hotel room, which I tend to steer clear of since it always seems to end up a mess one way or another. We were ushered to a waiting car and after our driver found out one of the men in the car was British they immediately started a heated argument about cricket. The British man was insisting that the brits had been winning but the driver was having none of this and said that the British won on Indian soil simply because it was the polite thing for the Indians to do for their guests. A lengthy debate followed with a lot of unintelligible terms such as “sticky wicket”, improper bowler, and tea with crumpets.

Excited to be there... and not eaten by cockroaches

We wanted to watch the sunset from one of the camel rides in the desert (touristy I know), so we went right from the hotel when we arrived to do that. Our driver told us at great length about his Swedish girlfriend who calls him monkey. We got the whole back-story on this and why he is also called donkey.

The first thing to know about camels is that they are TALL, very TALL – The Indian strain of camels must be much larger than the western china breed of camels because these were slightly terrifying, whereas the others looked extremely ride able.

We got on, which you have to do while the camel is sitting and then hold on for dear life and just trust luck that you wont fall off when the thing stands up, which is accompanied by a violent lurching back and forth motion, kind of like a mechanical bull in slow motion. We went off trotting towards the sand dunes, which rise out of the scrubby desert for a very small area, and because of this all of the tourist-camel-enthusiast-sunset-watchers are concentrated in one area. Despite this, it still was a really cool experience. The sand was the softest I have seen, and flowed like water would when you disturbed it. Steffen tried to sand board and ended up spectacularly wiping out, flying five feet in the air to land on his head.

After the sunset our camels literally galloped back to the camel depot, I guess thats a fitting term for the loading zone. We were the only camels going so fast and passed everyone else who were only walking or maybe trotting if they were adventurous, suckers. We saw this awesome sign back at the main area:

More camel riding pictures.....

After this we walked up to the fort, which was all lit up, to have some grub. We chose a place on top of one of the buildings ad had a wonderful diner accompanied by shooting stars. It was very romantic; unfortunately none of us are the romantic types. After dinner we wrote a novel in their guestbook, complete with pictures of samosas, camels, a few songs, and a camel drawn by Steffen which looked like it had been drawn by a lower life form. We were the only people left in the restaurant so the cook took us back into the kitchen and talked to us about Indian spices and cooking. He offered to give us a lesson the next day, but we ended up not having enough time, which was too bad.

Our amazing guestbook entry. Some choice quotes: "English not so good, stomach happy" , "Benny-Lava Approved Restaurant" , and of course, "Eeeeeeaat a samosaaa...Taiwan will touch your heart.."

Fort all lit up at night

Beer is good for your Child!!