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!!

I want to live in a Hutong

Although my apartment complex is supposedly one of the nicest in the city, and has a patch of greenery, and there are ferraris in the parking garage I still fucking hate the place. It is a soulless russian compound and I am planning on escaping as soon as I possibly can.

I realized just how much I hate it last night when I went to an apartment warming party at this awesome Hutong up in the north section of the city. This place was SO cool. It was a traditional Hutong, so one story, with a central courtyard surrounded by rooms (I will post pics shortly). The central courtyard had a little table to sit at and a BBQ for grilling and the whole thing was very cozy and authentic chinese, unlike my apartment complex. It was in a traditional Hutong area; a labrynth of narrow alleys connecting the different houses, usually crisscrossed with laundry and overgrown with vines. It is also a better area of people my age because you can bike to all of the major bar streets. They had decorated the place really well and had hung up prayer flags, which their neighbors were angry about because it could be a sign of them supporting Tibet, heaven forbid.

They have an extra room that I could move into right now, but I paid my rent through october and It would be an extremely low move to ditch out on Adam and Shobhit without warning.

Back to the night:
Veronica met up with me at Dongjiamen station and then we went together to try and find his apt.
I think we must have gone through at least 50 large beers, which are each only two kuai, so it didn't set them back too much I think. We played some classy card games, also known as Kings Cup and Indian Poker.. the later was an awesome game requiring even less mental capacity than Kings Cup if that is possible. All you do is draw a card, stick it to your forehead while making indian war sounds, and then bet sips of beer on whether you think your card is the highest or not.

We also played Wii for Baijio (I spelled that wrong) shots for a while... but that was nasty. I won a free breakfast at Rickshaw off of Jeff so I need to claim that pronto... since I have a love affair with rickshaw food.

At 2 in the morning we went for Tuar (things on sticks) (I was supposed to be asleep at this point), eggplant on a stick, bread on a stick, chicken feet on a stick - you can really get anything on a stick in china. I left in the middle of the meal since I was so exhausted and had quite the interesting cab ride home. Kind of on the scary side in a funny way actually, but not as bad as when we hit that pedestrian in SF. My cab driver kept saying I was Hen Piaoliang (means pretty) the whole way home ... all thirty minutes of it, and then when I went to get out of the car in my parking garage at Pinguo, he grabbed my arm and said I love you like 8 times in english and wouldn't let me go.. it was annoying since I was already in a bad mood from being tired and knowing I had to get up in 6 hours. I think I just made an indiscriminate angry noise, yanked my arm away and marched off.