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September 23, 2007
Jodhpur - The Blue City
Our train to Jodhpur left four hours late, so we got in at midnight instead of 8pm. Our hotel, even though we'd warned them and they'd said they'd pick us up, was a no show and didn't answer their phone. As it was 9km north of the city, we were in no mood to try and bargain a rickshaw driver to get us there at that time of night, so we began calling other options. As luck would have it, a non-commission-paying place less than a 2 minute walk from the rail station called Govind had an AC room available, and was clean, neat, spacious and imminently hospitable. The website gives this warning to travellers:
Note - Govind is the only Hotel not paying any commission to any autorickshaws or taxis (as mention in the latest lonelyplanet guide book), so when you touch Jodhpur you will hear many stories like Govind Hotel is a bad place or it is closed down. Please don't be carried away by such stories.If you want to come here tell the taxis driver that you want to go to the main GPO or the railway station.
It's sad how... scam-filled all of India is, such that it's so hard to just have an honest, friendly conversation with anyone, or even ask simple directions without getting directed/taken to a commission-paying shop or just misdirected. Govind was a haven from that, thankfully, and I had a wonderful chat with the owner, who like me is a coffee fanatic (a rare find in chaye-drinking India!) who has a good esperesso machine on his wifi-enaled rooftop restaurant/coffee bar. Yeah, you read that right.
Buying Spices
We set out the next morning to visit the clock tower and inadvertently ended up at MVSpices, a recommended place to buy spices. We bought, well, a LOT of indian spices and teas, which are shipping back to the US as I type (I hope?).
Mehrangarh Fort
The now-just-a-(very very rich)-citizen Raj of Jodhpur put a lot of effort into restoring the city's fort, Mehrangarh (garh means fort, btw). It's a bit of an ego-trip for him, and the (otherwise really good) audio guide makes sure you know he's behind it all. This was overall the most impressive fort of the trip, tho the Jaisalmer fort was interesting for different reasons.
The fort is huge, which I hope the photos do justice to. It took around 3 hours to wander through it, admittedly with some breaks and using the audio tour to slow us down as well. It offered stunning views on only of itself but also of the aptly-named Blue City below.
You can see why it was never successfully breached in the number of walls and gates and cannons/artillery of various vintages.
At one end of the fort there was a small Hindi shrine with a statue in the valley beside it. Tho you couldn't take photos inside the shrine, I used my fancy rotating camera screen to grab a shot from above the walled path to the shrine.
At another part of the fort, there seemed to be some people living there, where I took this photo of the door and some stacks of rocks, no doubt the free equivalent of blocks for the kids.
You can watch a video of me walking out the fort, accompanied by competing musicians:
Posted by griffjon at September 23, 2007 08:19 PM
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