Jodhpur: The Blue City

Hey everyone. I haven't had a chance to make any posts in a while because we've been really busy, with camels and all that. But to catch up, I think I'll go chronologically. This post is about Jodphur, which roughly translates to Jodah's City. It was founded ages ago, but really I'm not here to give a history lesson, I'm here to tell you what we did.

We stayed at a cool little place called the Krishna Pasham Haveli (or something like that, they just called it the KP Haveli). This was a totally remodeled Haveli (hindi for mansion house) and it was lovely inside, and since it was sitting just at the base of the fort we had a great view of the fort at night, and during the day. Right across from the KP Haveli was a little convenience store and the guys in there we really cool, they helped us figure out what to do and were generally the kind of people that make India great. :)

The first thing we did in Jodhpur, was get our bearings by walking around and shopping. Jodhpur is full of loads of cool little shops that have all kinds of useless Indian trinkets, which we have loaded up on. We've now sent three packages home to Leah's sister, who has no idea they're arriving and who will have to go pick them up from the post office. Just a few minutes from our haveli is the clock tower market, which is this insane madness of people, rickshaws motorcycles and people just laying their wares willy nilly all over the place.This is India. :)

There aren't really many restaurants in Jodhpur but we found a good (and cheap) one by recommendation at the Hotel Priya. Right across the street was a Softy and Softy ice cream shop that we went back to a couple times. The choco-dip was great!

Altogether I think people come to Jodhpur to see Merangarh Fort, a sprawling stone fort built on this huge rocky edifice in the middle of the desert. It is quite a site to see, so here you go:

Jodhpur and Merangarh Fort

The entire fort has been transformed into a museum, so we just followed the audio tour around. It was very good as far as audio tours go, and it was nice that there weren't people crowding around information placards trying to read about this stuff, we just listened as we walked.

You can see why they call this the blue city in some of the pictures, it is pretty cool to see so many houses painted the same way. Apparently they do this because blue helps cooling the walls, and it acts as an insect deterrent. I guess they would know!

We also walked around to the back of the fort, where there weren't any tourists. I guess there wasn't anything noteworthy on the audio tour, but I thought it was pretty cool walking around the parapets and seeing where the cannons were mounted.

We also tried to send a parcel from Jodhpur which was much more complicated than sending from Jaipur where it was so easy. Because of this, we hauled our package from Jodhpur to Jaisalmer, and then to Udaipur where we have just sent it off.

That's it!

pw