Day 72: Nov. 15: Exploring the Blue City

After breakfast, we climbed the hill behind our guest house to the Meherangarh Fort. From the rooftop with a birds eye view it looks like it would be easy to find your way, but when your view is obstructed by tall buildings along narrow streets, you feel like you're a mouse in a maze. This fort is still run by the maharaja of Jodhpur who is more interested in preserving the tradition and culture behind the fort than anything else. I guess it isn't too hard when you live in a beautiful palace a few kilometers away. The fort is on a huge 125m high hill, and looks imposing from every angle. Inside the courtyards and many rooms are memorizing. The audio tour (yes, we gave in) was really quite helpful. Although it makes looking harder, this particular tour was super informative and interesting.

After walking through most of the fort, it starts to make sense why it was never taken by enemy forces. Perhaps the most striking yet subtle thing that there was to see in the fort were the sati marks (shown as relief hand prints left by the maharaja's widows) on the wall as you exited. Karla was previously unaware of this now illegal practice of being burned alive with your dead husband when Alicia explained it . After hearing about it, she figured it was better to die in child birth than in flames just because it was tradition. We both agreed we wanted to look into it more closely.

A relatively short walk away was the marble Jaswant Thada Tomb. It was "more simple" than other tombs, temples etc, but it had this feeling of greatness when you walked around. The outside was the most impressive, and for once the pigeons on the roof looked majestic instead of dirty and annoying.

Next stop was lunch at Michael Baba's Hill View Guest house, which took forever, didn't taste the greatest and involved someone thinking we also wanted a massage (simply not true). They even called Michael himself from town and he came a-runnin. Poor guy.

Then we walked to the clock tower at the central bazaar and took a rickshaw to the Palace where the current maharaja lives (also doubles as a hotel). We had heard his voice in the audio tour and thought we'd visit his place (and palace) as well. We took a rickshaw (Karla loves riding them so nothing was lost really) but got there and were unimpressed. We thought it looked too modern and too influenced by the western/British world. But hey, it was an important place. We asked two white girls whether it was worth it to see the museum for a dollar- it wasn't, and so we rickshawed it down to the bus stands to buy a bus ticket to Jaislamer.

Then we tried walking back to the clock tower to check out the shops. We kinda got lost which was good and bad. Good because Karla found some sweet scarves and bad because Alicia was feeling far too queasy to be patient enough for shopping. When we tried getting home on a rickshaw we found that we were a lot closer than we thought and so had only been driven 1 block when the rickshaw couldn't go any further because the streets were too narrow. We gave the driver half of what we were gonna give him. He made some protesting noises but we were strong and kept walking.

Ginger tea was the answer to our sickness prayers. Karla tried what she had had the night before to compare the cooking of the real cook versus the nephew, Jack. Honestly Jack's was better because it was less greasy and had more vegetables.

After din din was packing time. And then we blogged a bit (we are almost up to date!). We have quite a few things to do in the morning, good night.
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