Jaisalmer - Part One

I'm writing this from Jaisalmer, one of the north-westernmost cities in Rajasthan and in fact very close to the Pakistani border. While Jodhpur is the Blue City, Jaisalmer, which sits in the Thar Desert, is the Golden City - and it really is golden in the sunlight. The big attraction here is once again the city fort, but the Jaisalmer fort is the only fort in India (and perhaps the world?) in which people are still living and working. We walked all around the fort and its walls the other day - it's actually much bigger than it looks from the town below, and we got lost a few times because the inner lanes are very narrow and mazelike. From the top we also got beautiful views across the desert and the town.

It's very very dry here, as apparently the annual monsoon has been absent for nine years now.
Apparently it's going to be devastating for local villages if the rains don't come this year.

Although Phil and I tried to like Jodhpur (and it does have a couple of things to recommend it), we never really warmed to the place. Jaisalmer, on the other hand, we absolutely love. Yes, it's more touristy than some of the other places we've been (lots of hardcore backpacker types, who seem to congregate around the Bhang Shop consuming bhang lassis and cookies!) but it has a really relaxed vibe. There are lots of great cafes, the people are friendly, and the town is studded with beautiful golden sandstone temples and havelis (traditional mansions that are now open to the public). We've also shopped until we've dropped at the clothing shops and I've got a couple of colourful printed pants that are really comfy. Even if they are a tourist trap, at $4 a pair I just couldn't resist!

It's really cold here during the mornings and evenings, I'd say about ten degrees or less. I'm really glad that I packed all my cold weather gear for Nepal as I have really needed it here.

After two weeks in India, Phil and I have established a daily routine pretty much based around taking chai. We've become obsessed with sharing big pots of masala chai on rooftop cafes everywhere - chai with breakfast, chai after lunch, a chai stop in the afternoon when we feel like a break, and a couple of pots of chai over dinner. Chai tea here is nothing like the overly sweet, cinnamon-laced stuff you get at Gloria Jeans at home. Here they make it by boiling milk and water with whole peppercorns, cloves, smashed fresh ginger, powdered tea leaves (so you don't need to strain the tea) and crushed cardamom pods and it's the most delicous, fragrant and warming thing ever.

For those who are interested in what we're eating, dinner is nearly always some form of curry and thankfully we're getting better at translating ingredients from Hindi into English so we now have more of an idea of what we're actually ordering and eating. In this part of India, they don't really eat much rice. Instead, the curries are accompanied by chapati (round pita-like breads cooked on a hotplate over a fire) so we usually have a couple of them, or a naan. For lunch today we found a little Tibetan restaurant and had big plates of steamed veggie momos with a chilli relish, they were delish. And then of course we had chai! We also had a samosa from a street stall as a morning snack, it was so crispy and filled with a decent whack of the fragrant, chilli-laden mashed vegetable mixture...absolutely delicious (and only 18 cents!). But then again I only really had the stodgy version from the takeaway Indian place at the Castle Towers food court to compare them to!

I love how easy it is to be a vegetarian in India. Most restaurants are actually pure vegetarian so you can't order any meat dishes even if you wanted to, and in the rest the menus are divided into 'veg' and 'non-veg' sections. Personally I think the veg selections look a lot more interesting anyway, there seem to be a million different dishes based on chickpeas, lentils, paneer cheese, fresh vegetables and spices.

I can't believe I've already written so much and still not covered the most memorable experience of our whole trip so far....our camel safari that we returned from this morning. But with all this food talk, I'm starving and it's already past dinner time. This hotel has free internet so I'll log back on later and write about the camels.

E x