Day Three:
February 9: Jodhpur
The next morning we got up early, checked out, and took a cab to the domestic airport. On the way we passed Chowpatty Beach, and a beautiful mosque out on a sandy strip in the bay (only accessible at low tide), and -- on the outskirts of the city -- acres and acres of shantytowns, corrugated metal roofs and mud as far as the eye could see.
We flew Jet Air to Jodhpur, in the state of Rajasthan. As soon as we arrived we could tell we were in another world; on the way to our hotel we saw camels (mostly pulling carts, laden with goods), and bristly pigs rooting in the gutters. Women were dressed differently than in Bombay: here everyone wore long skirts and headdress/veils in amazingly bright colors, pinks and greens and blues. We took a trishaw (a motorized rickshaw, built on a motor scooter base, which runs on a combination of gasoline and motor oil like American lawnmowers do):
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-- to what turned out to be our favorite hotel in the world: the Ajit Bhawan.
The Ajit Bhawan was built for Maharajadhiraj Sir Ajit Singhji, the younger brother of Maharaja Umaid Singhji (ruler of Jodhpur, back when Jodhpur was an independent state). The lobby is in the main building, a wonder of dark polished wood and cane furniture and enormous framed prints of doe-eyed Indian men in formal turbans (like this one of the Maharajadhiraj himself.) We stayed there twice, on either end of our Jaisalmer jaunt; the first time, we got a villa overlooking the pool. Our room was furnished with a heavy wooden bed, more beautiful old prints, kilim rugs, and colored glass globes suspended from the ceiling. The windows of our bathroom were screened by intricate carved sandstone.
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I think we would have loved the Ajit Bhawan in any event, but coming to it from the sad and seedy Hotel Godwin made its gracious beauty all the more amazing. We flopped on the bed, giggling and marveling. After eating lunch (fantastic tandoori kebabs) in the outdoor dining room, we stepped outside the hotel, to an amazing snapshot of India: in the far distance the Umaid Bhavan, the absurd sandstone palace of the onetime ruler of Jodhpur, and right across the street in the foreground a tent city where squatters live under burlap and black plastic.
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We took a trishaw to the highest point in town: the red sandstone Mehrangarh Fort. We would tour the fort itself on our second pass through Jodhpur; since we only had the afternoon in town this time, we decided to spend it in our usual favorite way, e.g. walking as much as our feet would bear.
We wound our way down from the fort, marveling at the vista of Jodhpur, "the Blue City," spread out like a cubist fantasy before us.
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Some sources say that the blue color originated when indigo was added to whitewash to protect houses from pests; others, that the blue color once marked the homes of people of Brahmin caste. Whatever the reason, today much of old Jodhpur is blue, and it's pretty beautiful.
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Ethan wrote a terrific essay called Travel without filters which includes some description of that walk. We wended our way slowly down the steep hill. At the first blue house we came to, a man popped out wishing us "namaste" and wanting us to come inside and see his home. (We demurred, certain he would want to be paid handsomely for the privilege.)
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Another man, further down the hill, greeted us and asked whether our government makes two-dollar bills; then he produced a binder filled with all kinds of two- bills, and slyly asked us to contribute to his foreign currency collection.
We walked narrow streets and narrower alleys. Everywhere we saw amazing wooden doors and carved gates.
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As we worked our way down, the cacophony of city got louder. Music, cars, horns, voices. Cows blocked traffic, grazing on trash. Our noses filled with the combined odors of smoke, incense, open sewers, curry. The narrow streets were lined with tiny businesses on the ground floor of most buildings, one wall open to the street (usually sliding metal garage-style doors), where barbers cut hair, cobblers stitched soles to sandals, boys filed edges off of silver.
After a while we took a trishaw to the Clocktower Market, an open bazaar in a "chowk" (open square) around an old clocktower. It was chaos: vegetables on carts, people selling everything you can think of, women on blankets urging us to buy their bangles and bracelets. We bought a couple of bolts of tiedie and a few silver bracelets, but were quickly overwhelmed by the noise and the demands of the vendors, and walked away from the center of things, winding up on a main street choked with camel carts and cars and trishaws and bicycles and cows. Here the open-to-the-street shops sold saris, sandals, tin cookpots. We were desperate to sit down, but knew that if we claimed a patch of sidewalk we'd be swarmed by shoeshine boys and bangle-sellers, so we kept walking until we found a tiny shop, about the size of a packing crate, with two little tables and benches. We bought a bottle of water, an orange soda, and a package of chickpea-flour spicy things to nibble on, and rested our feet gratefully.
Then we took a trishaw back to the hotel, where we sat on our bougainvillea'd terrace overlooking the pool, and listened to every mourning dove in Rajasthan assembling in a nearby tree.
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