Jaiselmer
The road to Jaipur accross the Thar desert is very good, thanks to the Indian army who have regiments of tanks in the area (close to Pakistan border) as well as their nuclear test site. On the way we got a flat tyre in the middle of nowhere. While Mukesh changed the wheel, we milled around noticing how hot and sandy it was. Several locals came wandering up to spectate, illustrating that in India there is always somebody about, even in the desert. They told us what the tracks in the sand were; peacock mostly with some antelope and lizards.
Jaiselmer fort looks like the world's biggest sandcastle with dozens of bucket-shaped bastions round the curtain wall. Inside it is still like a mediaeval town (apart from a few motorbikes); a maze of winding alleys and tiny shops and some wonderfully carved Jain temples. It is known as the Golden City as all the buildings are of golden sandstone and not brick (plenty sandstone around, no mud). It gets up into the high 40 degrees in summer here; mid thirties seemed quite enough.
The main business in Jaiselmer is selling camel safaris, where you go for a camel ride, have a big dinner in the desert with native dancing then sleep in a tent or out under the stars if you prefer. Some elements of this appealed to us but we were reluctant to get fed into the tourist sausage machine. It took us some time to convince our hotel that not only did we not want to buy their camel safari, but we weren't going to sneak off and get another cheaper one somewhere else. Apart from that, Jaiselmer was a fascinating place. In the main town there are old havelis (mansion houses around courtyards with incredibly intricate stone carving) which you can visit- some dilapidated, some restored. Out in the desert there are ancient abandoned towns, windswept, djinn-haunted places that would not be out of place in a spaghetti western.
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