Rajasthan Rampage Tour: a Primer

I just got back from 2 weeks across north India with a friend of mine from Watseka, Pete. He’s pretty well-traveled, but had never been to India. With me here, and with some other friends of his in Mumbai for New Year’s, he decided to pull the trigger. Sanju had no objections to the trip (she’s about to leave for Bangkok for a week–vacations seem the norm here), so I met him in Mumbai, and we toured North India for two weeks.

We hit:

• Udaipur, a city on a bunch of lakes, with some amazing palaces on islands
• Jaipur, the capital of Rajasthan and home to a huge fort, as well as a cool old outdoor observatory thing, plus tons of soot
• Jaisalmer, a not-very-touristy-but-totally-should-be desert city in far western Rajasthan, also home to a cool desert fort and camel safaris
• Jodhpur, the "Blue City," named because many of the houses were painted a shade of light blue, using a paint that warded off mosquitos. Also home to a big fort with free wifi.
• Delhi, sort of a home base for the second half of the trip. Home to a whole lot of people, and also an amazing Baha’i Temple.
• Amritsar, the "Sikh Capital," home to their really cool and surprisingly tourist-friendly Golden Temple.
• Agra, home of the Taj, but otherwise a hellish locale.

We traveled exclusively by train, aside from the flight into Mumbai and out of Delhi. That was quite an experience, but I’ll do a full post on that later. Trains in India are a destination in themselves.

I hope these posts don’t get too repetitive. I’ll try to write more about the events than just, like, temple descriptions. But yeah, this was bound to be part travel blog, part updating the ‘rents. So bear with me if any of these drag.