From the pink city, we headed to Jodhpur, "The Blue City". I was really impressed by Jodhpur, because about 80% of the buildings were blue. It is a really pretty sight to look at. Also, right in the centre of the town is a huge fort, built on the top of a mountain. It towers above everything, and is especially impressive at night when it is lit up from underneath.
We arrived at about 10am, after our hellish 2:45am train ride, so we took the day easy, got some food, wandered around a bit, and relaxed.
The following day I was finally feeling better, so we decided to have a birthday celebration. We headed up to the fort on the top of the mountain, and instead of seeing it the traditional way, we splurged, and ziplined across it. It was really amazing seeing the fort from a different perspective, and it was a lot more fun than just walking around and sightseeing. That night we found a lovely rooftop restaurant that served chicken (we were sick of vegetarian meals by this point!) and were able to get our hands on a couple of beers (a real struggle in India). It was a really nice night, looking at the lit fort, hearing the Muslim calls to prayer, and relaxing.
Our plan from Jodhpur was originally to head to Jaisalmer, and do a camel safari in the desert. We saw that our hotel also offered camel safaris, and since our biggest expenses are travelling between places, we decided to cut our losses and go with our hotel. We ended up being pretty grateful that we hadn't wasted our money going out of the way for it. We were super excited to start riding the camels, and after the 1,5 hour jeep ride into the (sort of) desert, the time had come.
I got the first camel, Diamond, with the guide, and Robin had his own camel, Michael Jackson (He renamed it to Englebert Humperdink though). It was really exciting, until about 15 minutes in, when we realised that they were actually going their full speed. I was super bored, in this desert with nothing to look at, and I looked back to see if Robin was enjoying it, and the sight of him reading his novel answered my question. I feel like MAYBE if we went with a big group of people, it would have been more fun, because we could have at least chatted. Instead, we were on two different camels, too far to have a normal conversation, with a guide who couldn't speak English singing along to his Bollywood songs from his phone. It took us 2 hours to get to the house where we would have lunch. By then we were kind of over the whole riding camels idea, but we had 2 more hours ahead of us, before going up a dune for sunset. By nightfall, neither of us could sit down because we had such sore bums.
One thing that really was impressive was the night sky. We slept on cots under the stars, and they were SO bright. In the couple of hours before we went to sleep, we saw 4 shooting stars! In the morning we had breakfast, and then set out again for a camel ride. We saw quite a few animals on that ride, but after 2 hours we decided that we had had enough. We still had to organise a bus for that night, so we told the guide we wanted to go back to Jodhpur. The people were surprised, and seemed hurt, but we assured them our bums were just too sore to ride any more, and no, we were not bored. Instead of riding the camels to the jeep pick up point, we rode the jeep on the sand. The only problem was that our driver had a 2 wheel drive jeep. He had to drive really fast, and swerve side to side. It was really scary, especially going around sandy corners without being able to slow down, and swerving for animals along the way. We actually started to prepare ourselves for when the jeep rolled, which thankfully it didn't. Ironically, afterwards we both thought it was the most exciting part of our camel safari! Haha! It is definitely not something I would recommend to other people!
That night we got a sleeper bus to Ahmedebad, because we had booked tickets to Goa from Ahmedebad airport. We knew we were going a bit off the backpacker route, and hoped to find some interesting things. Boy were we wrong. If you ever need to go to Ahmedebad, DON'T! It is the most foreigner unfriendly place we encountered. Our hotel was really bad, and they treated us horribly. There were no restaurants or anything of interest anywhere near us, and when we walked around people would stop and ask to take photographs with us. We had hawkers shoving their children at us and begging, and it was filthy. Luckily we had a lot of TV to watch, so we shut ourselves in our room, and avoided people until the next morning when we went to the airport for our flight to Goa!
