Jodphur

If you're sitting in the UK reading this, perhaps at work, you'll probably think that what I'm about to say next is crazy, ungrateful or both. I know we are incredibly priveliged to be able to travel like this and some of the things we've seen and done have been amazing. That said the trip so far has been hard at times. Not the kind of hard that daily life is for scores of people we pass every day, but hard in comparison to the kind of existence I inhabited before I left. Our schedule so far has been pretty gruelling, with never more than 2 nights in one place, interspersed with night trains. If you add to that the shits, homesickness, lack of sleep, culture shock, the shits, living out of a bag, being surrounded by starnge people and strange things, a drastic change in diet, travelling at odd times and missing meals, sometimes several in a row, and the shits, it has been challenging.

Also, the shits.

I choose to say this for a few reasons: honesty, as a record, as a reminder that this is one of the reasons that I came on this trip. I choose to say this now because I'd like to offer some explanation for my lack of words about or pictures of Jodphur.



The night train from Jaisalmer left at 11:30pm and arrived at 5:15am the next day. We catch an auto from the station to our hotel. In the pre-dawn darkness, we bump and crash through the narrow streets. It's very difficult to keep track of where we are going. After ten or fifteen minutes, we pull up outside the large, wrought-iron gate that seperates the hotel from the street. They are locked. Our driver bangs on them a few times and a man emerges and lets us in. We walk into the lobby and I notice that there is a bedroll on the floor, recently vacated. Spared the usual rigmarole of checking into an Indian hotel - writing extensive personal, passport and visa details into various books - we are provided a key and shown to our room.
The hotel itself is pretty nice. Our room opens onto a courtyard full of plants. We eat some food on the roof and then retire. We watch the end of a movie dubbed in Hindi, starring a wild-eyed Charlie Sheen and an alien invasion. Our train to Udaipur leaves at 6am the next day. Exhausted, we don't manage to leave the hotel.

The next morning, we check out just after five. The same man who checked us in is asleep on the floor of the lobby. He doesn't stir as we enter so I leave our room key on the counter and we leave quietly.
The sun has just risen and we wander the streets of Jodphur with our backpacks on, trying to find the station or an auto to take us there. There are plenty parked up but all are emtpy and there are no drivers in sight.

The streets are quiet. I ask directions of a man sitting in a first storey window. I try to mime "train station" and make train noises. He points back in the direction we came.

We walk down a narrow road to find an old man, dressed all in white with an immaculate white beard, chasing a young bull down the street. The bull retreats a few paces and turns to face the old man. Time and time again he raises his walking stick into the air and the bull runs a little further down the road. We sidle nervously around the animal and find ourselves on a more major road, this one happily with light traffic. We flag down a rickshaw and drive to the station.