Jaipur Junction looked as if it had seen better days, yet it was still crawling with life. I stepped my way among throngs of people either rushing between platforms, or sitting scattered across the crusty, outdoor rail station of Rajasthan’s capital. Nathan and Santosh had dropped me off at around 2 in the afternoon, as our tour of Jaipur had ended earlier than expected. I’d arrived at the station three hours ahead of a train that would take me from the pink city to the blue city, since I had been too sick to visit the latter with Nathan and Caleb the weekend before. Instead of returning to Delhi with Nathan for a couple more days, I decided to take my own trip to the blue city, eager to catch up on what I missed while down and out with the infamous “Delhi belly”. Having parted ways with Nathan, I instantly became aware of the fact that I was the only western-looking traveler among the hundreds in my immediate surroundings, and it brought about a sense of isolation I had never felt before. Not wanting to linger there for three hours, I tried to switch to an earlier train. After a both unique and frustrating experience of pushing my way through a horde of aggressive patrons at a ticket counter, I was now holding a second ticket for the same train. Feeling too overwhelmed to argue over an extra expenditure of a handful of dollars, I found my way to a waiting room to sit and write to pass the time.

Traveling by rail in India is just about how you would expect it to be after spending a week and a half acclimating to the country: Loads of people crammed into far-from-comfortable accommodations. When viewed from the exterior, the trains themselves appear more like freight trains; more metallic and rustic than the sleek, polished passenger trains with many windows that I was used to in Europe. On the inside, the passenger car in which I sat was lacking in natural light, with old and worn seats/beds, none of it looking like it had been replaced in the last two decades. I was travelling in third class, in an AC sleeper car, so I was seeing neither the best, nor the worst of what Indian rail travel had to offer (friends in Pune later told me that had I selected general class, that I would never find myself near an Indian train again).

Each 3AC car contained at least 6 compartments I would guess, and each compartment could seat up to eight passengers, all mostly elbow to elbow when the bunks were folded up, sharing only a tiny table on one side of the compartment. The walkway through the train caused each compartment to take the shape of a “T”: the top of the “T” holding two bunks stacked above each other parallel to the walkway between compartments, with the longer segment of the “T” holding two stacks of three bunks each, and laying perpendicular to the walkway and train tracks. I arrived to find the pillows and blankets of the previous passengers still inside the compartment, with someone coming by later on to remove them and pass out clean ones. I was on the bottom bunk, and had spent most of the five-hour journey sitting upright and chatting with another young passenger (which really helped to curb the isolation I was feeling), but later on was forced to lay horizontal in my bunk, with two more sleeping passengers directly above me, and another stack of three sleepers two and a half feet to my side. Personal space was a luxury to say the least, and I won’t even go into describing the toilet situation. With Rajasthan being mostly desert, the train trudged along through rural areas with no wireless service, and the continuous swaying and jostling of the train cabin made reading (not to mention writing) a dizzying process. So I settled into my bunk and eventually fell asleep. With the train pulling into Jodhpur station around 11pm, I gave a heads up to the hosts at the haveli that I had booked, and then went to find a rickshaw to take me there.

A.J. is the proprietor of Suraj Haveli, the family-run guest house I was staying at in Jodhpur. He met me at the dimly-lit rickshaw drop-off location sometime before midnight, and led me to his family home through shadowy alleyways too narrow for any car or rickshaw to navigate. The haveli was beautiful; full of native plants, with its walls painted in vivid shades of blue and purple and decorated with traditional Indian art and craft works. The haveli was very narrow in width, but spread out vertically over four stories, with an open air rooftop kitchen and patio all sitting under the shadow of the city’s menacing and famous mountaintop fortress. A.J. made sure I had fresh water, and something to snack on before showing me to my room, warmly assuring me that his home was now also my home. I learned that A.J.’s family practices an ancient Indian religion called Jainism, which is practiced by less than 1% of the Indian population. Non-violence is one of the main tenets of Jainism, which also extends to animals, and greatly affects the Jain diet. For this reason, Suraj Haveli had a firm “vegetarian only” policy, but practicing Jains have even more restrictions. Along with eggs, they refuse to eat bread (since yeast is a living organism), and only consume dairy if they know that the animals it is sourced from are not mistreated. They also don’t eat any underground root plants, such as potatoes, onions, and garlic for example. Thankfully, they didn’t pass the more specific restrictions on to the guests, as I had some of the best vegetable fried rice of my life for dinner the next night.

I headed up to the rooftop in the morning, to take a chilly breakfast with a gorgeous view of the blue city. There were other guests out on the patio as well, but since it was still early, I just kept to myself and wrote. Looking out across the city, you have a wide view of the neighboring rooftops. The tall houses were all so packed together that you could jump between them, though I was satisfied just to watch and marvel at how so many people can live in such a small area (even after having already experienced the much more dense Delhi). Breakfast soon arrived, and seemed to be unending - starting with coffee and cereal, followed by a banana and fruit muffin, and then three slices of toast with butter and jam, with mango juice to wash it down - with the final course being a banana and honey crepe. I was amused to find that when the cooks needed any ingredients or items from the pantry downstairs, they would call a family member down in the pantry and lower a small basket down to them by rope from the open air rooftop kitchen, then raise it back up, now containing whatever it was they asked for (havelis are traditionally built up around an open air-courtyard, although since this one was much narrower, it felt more like a multi-story, open-air hostel). Another thing unique to Suraj for me, was that this was the only place I had stayed at so far in India that had readily available hot water in the bathrooms - you normally had to manually turn on a small hot water heater in the bathroom and wait ten to fifteen minutes for it to heat up. I had decided I could splurge a little bit after losing two full days to such a miserable stomach bug, so I was spending around $25 per night at Suraj (for a total of two nights), as opposed to the $10 or less I had budgeted for the rest of my trip (which would mainly be hostels).

I somehow managed to descend from the patio on my own after eating that entire meal, and then found A.J., who gave me some recommendations on how to spend the day, as well as some background on the history of Jodhpur. Known both as the “Blue City”, and the “Sun City” throughout India, Jodhpur has stood for over 500 years within the Marwar region of Rajasthan, which A.J. translated to “land of death”, but I’ve also seen it translated as “region of desert”. It is called the “Blue City” because of the old city’s inclination towards blue/indigo exterior walls, with local legend being that the Brahmin caste of Hindus started this practice. Jodhpur is also called the “Sun City” because it boasts nearly year-long sunny weather. With my visit being in winter, the morning air was cool - around 50’s Fahrenheit I guessed, and I could tell A.J. was fighting a cold as he led me to the Sadar Market near Ghanta Ghar, the city clock tower. The handicrafts industry is larger even than tourism in Jodhpur, and the city is one of the largest textile exporters in India. After a brief look through a textile shop Nathan had recommended, I promised the owner I’d return later and went to find a rickshaw up to Jaswant Thada, the glowing, marble mausoleum overlooking the city. From here, there was a wide, grand view of the entire city, sitting underneath my next destination, Mehrangarh Fort.

Mehrangarh Fort is one of India’s largest fortresses, built to protect the Rajput (warrior class) kings and queens of Rajasthan from outside invaders. Situated upon a high hill known as “the mountain of birds”, the stronghold is ringed by multiple levels of walls, the highest and innermost being over 115 ft tall and 70 ft wide. The fort was built with a number of brilliant defensive features. For example, the gates (of which there are seven) are in some places not set squarely into the wall, but are inset and pivoted at a right angle to the wall - causing any charging war elephant to lose all momentum as it reaches the wall, now forced to turn ninety degrees, and attack from a point of weakness. These gates were also covered top to bottom in foreboding, metal spikes to further deter against attack. My tour of Mehrangarh was guided by a dramatic voice on one of those walkman-like audio players. It started at the base of the fort, climbing steeply upward through the various gates to view the palaces that now serve as a museum. The tour took me through lavish royal chambers, courtyards, and gathering halls, showing displays of elegant garments, quilts, and tapestries crafted in those times. There were also many displays of the tools and instruments used in daily life of Rajput society - palanquins, howdahs - or saddles - for elephant riding, and the intricately fashioned medieval weapons they used. Overall, I found Mehrangarh to be much more impressive than the forts I had toured in Agra and Jaipur, largely thanks to the content of the museum, but it also had some truly breathtaking views all around.

After finishing the tour of the fortress, I headed to the lower walls to take a zip lining tour with guides by Flying Fox, a British company that puts on zip line experiences at a handful of locations around Asia. I had two guides to myself since no other tourists had booked during my time slot. They helped me into a harness, and we tested it out on a small training course inside the fortress gardens before climbing up to the top of the walls to start the full tour. The chattier of the two guides, Chanderveer, was originally from Jodhpur, and we had a pleasant time talking about life and work in our respective countries as we zipped around the fort and its surroundings. The course contained a set of six zip lines, each somewhere around several hundred meters in length, starting from the top of one of the inner walls, and taking us over the outer walls, and into and around the boulder field beyond. I’d land at a receiving station, be unhooked by whichever guide zipped before me, wait for the other guide to land, then we’d hike through rocky terrain up to the next platform to take off on another line. With six unique lines, you were always getting a different view - whether that was flying over fortress battlements, or looking down upon the lakes and step well bordering the Blue City, or soaring over the rocky, surrounding hills. From this side of the fortress, one is able to see the set from the film Dark Knight Rises - they filmed at Mehrangarh to create a locale for the exterior of the “pit” prison, with the interior of it being filmed at a studio in London, though that was inspired by the Abhaneri step well, also in Rajasthan (which I discussed in my last post).

After finishing the zip tour, I exited the fortress via a lower gate that leads into oldest part of the Blue City, and wandered through narrow alleyways, finding my way to the markets surrounding the Ghanta Ghar clock tower. The famous clock tower almost looked more European than Indo-islamic, and for a few rupees, I was able to climb up the staircase to take another look across the city. A young Indian who went by “Rex,” and who must have been in his teens, kept following me around for pictures, asking to borrow my sunglasses as he posed for photos around the clock tower. We exchanged contact info so that I could send him the photos. He then requested a couple more, and took a really nice photo of me, before we parted ways. During the rest of my time in Jodhpur, he was insitsent that we meet up again, calling me his “best friend”. I declined to do so, sensing he was more interested in my camera than me. After checking out the nearby Toorji step well, I returned later in the night to the market, to spend more time looking at the wares of the textile merchant I had visited briefly in the morning, but also to watch the clock tower, as every evening it is bathed in lights of many different colors.

I found Jodhpur to be much more relaxed, and much easier to breathe comfortably in than any of the North Indian cities I had visited thus far, and wished I had more than just two nights to spend before moving on.

View from my bunk on the train to Jodhpur

Royal chambers in one of the palaces of Mehrangarh fort

Panorama of Mehrangarh and the Blue City of Jodhpur

Ghanta Ghar towering over the bazaars of Jodhpur

Matthew David Nelson

by Matthew D Nelson

Jodhpur /February 18, 2019 by Matthew Nelson

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