Cold Jodhpur morning
Oh, and yes! It is blue!
We stayed at the Haveli Inn Pal which promised to have the best views of Meherangarh Fort in the town. It delivered fully with the most amazing breakfast views I've ever seen. Like all of Rajasthan, Jodhpur was cold and I spent most of my time double-wrapped in first my Polartech fleece followed by a Pashmina shawl, that I almost never took off.
The hotel was actually in the walled and gated old Sardar Bazaar which meant that all you had to do was step out the door and you were in the thick of it. We asked about going somewhere when we first arrived and the hotel owner said that we should wait until after 10am the next day so that we could see it when it was "animated," and animated it was. A veritable sea of people and goods and, and, and . . . that made it very easy to squint your eyes a bit and float back in time to when the fort was still occupied and the markets were held here.
We stayed at the Haveli Inn Pal which promised to have the best views of Meherangarh Fort in the town. It delivered fully with the most amazing breakfast views I've ever seen. Like all of Rajasthan, Jodhpur was cold and I spent most of my time double-wrapped in first my Polartech fleece followed by a Pashmina shawl, that I almost never took off.
The hotel was actually in the walled and gated old Sardar Bazaar which meant that all you had to do was step out the door and you were in the thick of it. We asked about going somewhere when we first arrived and the hotel owner said that we should wait until after 10am the next day so that we could see it when it was "animated," and animated it was. A veritable sea of people and goods and, and, and . . . that made it very easy to squint your eyes a bit and float back in time to when the fort was still occupied and the markets were held here.
While in Jodhpur we went to the Jaswant Thanda (memorial to the 17th C ruler who chased away Jodhpur's bandits) and to Meherangarth Fort. By this time we were a little forted-out, but it was still very impressive with tons of cool stuff in each of the rooms.
After hanging out at the fort for the morning, Immo, Diana and Kekai opted to take an autorickshaw back to the hotel, while Tim, Kalani, and I decided to walk down the backside of the fort to the old/blue city that lay on the other side. It was a fun walk; it turns out that the back of the fort still has housing and so we met a pretty funny group of kids (one of whom is an aspiring photographer, I have a ton of pictures taken by her...) then walked into the winding roads of the Blue City. Very cool. Lots of it has been repainted to more stayed colors but there is still a great deal of blue (someone told me it was originally painted blue to keep away insects) and there were some wonderful views down these crazy-narrow streets that made up the town. Just walking around was nice but Kalani lucked out because we wandered into a part of town where the sword-makers lived and kept shop and ended up in the shop of an old man who'd been doing swords for a long time. He had rooms and rooms of swords, from original maharaja times to modern reproductions and he'd even been selected to do the weaponry for a movie that was filmed there and still had a bunch of that lying around (including some thin ones that were for show but bent like a string when touched). We spent a long time in his shop and house.
The only part about this that wasn't good was saying good-bye to our driver. When we sat down to settle the bill, he showed us something nearly double what we'd expected. There was a lot of back and forth (the page of the book where he'd written down the original mileage suddenly looked different from what we'd seen at the start of the trip) and we finally realized that the final odomoter numbers didn't even match what was in the car. It was a fairly painful (from my standpoint) experience, but he left with handshakes all around and no hard feelings (we paid just a little more than what we thought we should have) so I guess all's well that ends well. . . .