Jodhpur

The nice thing about having a driver is that you can tell him what time you want to wake up in the morning and you don’t have to worry about him leaving without you. We left for Jodhpur around 10 that morning and it took about 6 hours. On the way we saw the people walking to Jaisalmer again, but at one point there were hundreds of shoes along the side of the road. Rajeev said that when they reached a certain distance from the temple, they had to take their shoes off. I didn’t think walking that far could get any worse but apparently it can.

When we got there, Rajeev took us to buy spices. The girl who worked there let us smell all of them and did a saffron demonstration. She told us that when you buy saffron in the markets, a lot of times it’s really shreds of newspaper that they dyed to look like saffron. Gross! We bought some spices from her but she had to add ingredient lists to them in order for us to take them through Australia, so she told us she would have our bodyguard pick them up for us later. What? Bodyguard? Ohhh, Rajeev. Haha. We never really thought of him as our bodyguard but I guess he is in a way.

It was pretty late in the afternoon after we finished smelling spices so we went back to our hotel to rest. Later we had dinner on the rooftop restaurant which had a great view of the fort and the city.

In the morning, Rajeev showed us the way to Mehrangarh Fort and we walked up to the top. That was the first place where people really seemed notice us a lot. They either stared, took pictures of us, or wanted to take pictures with us like when I was in China. We don’t know for sure, but we’re guessing that it was the people who were walking along the side of the road and they stopped to see the Fort along the way. Maybe they were from smaller villages and not as used to seeing tourists.

The fort was one of the only monument-type things to see in Jodhpur so we went back to the hotel. I decided to get an Ayurvedic massage before dinner which is an Indian type of massage. It was really relaxing and very cheap.

That night we had dinner on the roof again and watched some kids fly kites. We went to bed early because we had to get up early in time to make it to Jaisalmer for our camel safari.