A driver picks Erin and me up at the Amit Jaggi Memorial Hospital in Agra late in the afternoon, and we sail past the Taj Mahal in the distance as we leave the city – me, having never made it there in person. “Aggra-vating,” I mumble – totally intending the pun – but the joke falls flat, even on myself.
Erin tries to comfort me: “Lucky we could see it from the window of our hotel that first night!”
“Yeah,” I sigh.
“And awesome that we had a poster of it at the foot of our hospital beds!” she jokes.
“Yeah, awesome,” I try, not finding it funny just yet. It will come, I think, remembering a Brotip about bad experiences slowly turning into funny stories and then happy memories. All in good time.
We knock on the door of the Pearl Palace Hotel room of the others when we arrive in the "Pink City" of Jaipur, and get a great reception from Harriet, Clare and Pete, hugging like long, lost friends – having been parted for just over 24 hours. We head to the rooftop restaurant for some dry toast and antibiotics for dinner, and check out the lights of the city, planning the next day’s outing.
In the morning, we meet India’s most annoying tour guide, Odi, who insists we stick to his regimented plan and will not answer any questions outside of his script, which he delivers in a particularly grating sing-song manner. We visit City Palace and the neighbouring Jantar Mantar, a collection of architectural, astronomical and “jod-ee-ark” (zodiac) instruments and sundials built by the
Maharaja (king) in the 1700s. Odi then proceeds to tell us exactly what we must take photos of. “You take photo NOW,” he instructs authoritatively. The antibiotics I’m on are as nauseating as Odi, so the whole sightseeing fiasco doesn’t go down too well. Mercifully, we release Odi from his services in the afternoon and I sleep the rest of the day away at the hotel while the others walk around the Pink City taking photos of whatever they would like to, and not what Odi says they must.
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| The Blue City and its fort |
We leave Jaipur at 6am the following day, and travel the long, straight road filled with more cows and now horses, to Jodhpur, the "Blue City". We arrive at lunchtime to a similar-looking city to Jaipur (only with everything painted blue, not pink), with wonderful views of the city’s fort from the rooftop of our hotel. There’s definitely a set formula for these cities in Rajasthan – paint the buildings all one colour, tick, build a fort, tick.
We head out for a walk up a steep road to the fort, but I don’t quite make it to the top, nearly fainting on the way – this does not bode well for our Everest Base Camp trek in just 10 days’ time. Instead of jostling with the crowds at the fort, Clare and I find a quiet spot on the adjacent hill with monuments resembling Stonehenge, perched above the Middle Eastern-looking city. We fall asleep on some rocks in the sun, listening to a brass band rehearsing for the following day’s celebrations for India Republic Day, the same day as Australia Day. It’s not quite
Advance Australia Fair or
Walzing Matilda I’ve heard on the 26th of January for the past few years at the Australian Open in Melbourne, but the traditional Indian folk music is played just as passionately and patriotically.
We have another 6am departure from Jodhpur, and after a quick phonecall to Dr Jaggi back in Agra, I stock up on anti-nausea meds he recommends, still trying to shake off the side-effects of the E.coli-fighting drugs, days after leaving hospital. On our journey to Jaisalmer, Vishnu swerves at random to avoid donkeys and camels, and of course the customary cows that roam the highways. As we pull into the “Golden City” of Rajasthan (again – choose a colour, build a fort), people are dressed in their Sunday best outfits and school uniforms for Republic Day, and a shambolic parade is taking place. We drive through the town in the Tourist-mobile, as we’ve dubbed our ever-so-obvious mode of transport, and almost become part of the parade. We certainly are a star attraction; strapping King Peter (with his four princesses in tow) receives a lot of stares.
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| Contrary to popular belief, Erin and Barn are not conjoined |
The manager of our hotel is extremely excitable and, most unfortunately, has a lisp. He tells us about the “Jaithalmer dethert fethtival” that we won’t be around for in February, and he says one of the highlights is a “tharee” (sari) tying” and turban-wrapping competition between the locals “to thee how fatht they can tie them!” he enthuses. We tell him we’re keen to do an overnight camel safari, and he happily points us in the direction of Adventure Travel, recommended by our friend Cassie. There, we meet the German office manager, Martina, possibly the most helpful person we’ve come across on our travels. Being a rare European citizen of Jaisalmer, we ask how she came to live here, and she smiles and says, “My heart.” We’re not sure if she means she loves the place, or someone in particular here, but she tells us she lives six months of the year in Jaisalmer, and the other six months in Britain, and she seems to make it work. Martina gives us the ins and outs of overnight trips into the desert and shows us the thick swags we’ll sleep in on the desert sand. We head off in very high spirits, eager for our safari the next day.
We walk up to the fort and buy birthday presents for Barn, whose birthday was almost forgotten last week in the blur of the Agra hospital visit. Us girls have decided to surprise him with a camel safari birthday party in the desert, and we go all out – Clare and I buy him a bronze camel statue, while Erin and Harriet purchase a fancy
Maharaja (king) shirt, a wooden recorder and plastic party whistles. We also pitch in for a cake from the German Bakery, and ask them to write “Happy Birthday Peter” on it, before changing our minds and asking that they make that “Happy Birthday
King Peter” – as much to the owner’s amusement as our own.
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| Jeep ride into the desert |
The following day Harriet’s not feeling well at all, and waits until the last minute to decide that she will still come on the camel safari – not letting King Peter’s birthday celebrations be postponed again by illness. We board a jeep for a 50-minute ride into the desert, and meet our camels and their ‘drivers’ (trainers). I’m a little nervous of the large animals, having not “got back on the horse” after being bucked off one at El Rancho camp in Waikanae as a 10-year-old. Noting my apprehension, Lalu the camel driver appoints me “Babbu Bhai”, the smallest and best-behaved of all the camels, he promises. The camel drivers wrap our turbans on our heads, and after the initial terror of climbing on the camel and lurching forwards then backwards as it stands up, we trot off in a row, and it is actually quite fun. In our colourful camel-print pants and rainbow of turbans, we feel very
Sex and the City 2 – well, the girls do anyway. Barn doesn’t have a bar of it.
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| Sweet ride |
We ride the camels for just over an hour into the desert, stopping along the way at a local village in the middle of nowhere, with huts made of dried camel dung, mud and water. Children mob us when we climb off the camels to have a look around, and Lalu tells me all about the people of the village. He was brought up in a desert village like this, and he’s never been to school; “I learn my English only from the tourist,” he admits. I tell him his English is very good, and he blushes, shrugging it off. “The children here now are verrrrrry luckeeeee,” he reckons, as they get picked up by buses each day to go to a desert school.
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| Home for the night |
We continue on our camel safari, and after another short ride we arrive at our spot for the night – untouched dunes with sand swept across them in neat waves, like freshly groomed powder of ski-fields. We arrive just in time for photos in front of the sunset, and Clare helps Lalu and his cooks make a large pot of deliciously sweet Indian cardamom tea. As the cooks make dinner by the impossibly dim light of their mobile phones and the flames below the pot, we chat and aimlessly dig our feet into the still-warm and silky sand. A young Indian guy from Delhi, Sagar, is also on our safari trip – the only one not from our travelling group – and he’s much more in the know with the Indian desert, managing to get the camel drivers to source some suspect-looking desert alcohol made from the cactus plant. He becomes chattier after a few swigs of the stuff, and asks us what kind of music we listen to, before pulling out his BlackBerry and generously playing a few tunes aloud for the group.
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| Clare's culinary skills put to the test in the desert |
We stifle grins when he blasts WHAM!’s
“Careless Whisper” – somehow I don’t think it’s on the Top 25 Most Played lists on any of our iPods. It couldn’t be a more inappropriate tune for the occasion, but it’s a nice gesture, nonetheless. Barn is the only one of us game enough to try the vodka-like desert drink, but he’s quick to give me a slightly more careful whisper to let me know it tastes like paint-stripper. Under the moonless sky, he’s able to rid his makeshift cup (a Fanta bottle with the top sliced off, care of Sagar) of the drink on the sly. As if on cue, George Michael belts out, “Now that you’re gone, now that you’re gone,” from the BlackBerry, signalling not only the end of the song, but mercifully for Barn, the end of his foray into dodgy desert alcohol.
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