Our overnight train to Jaisalmer was a doozy. For starters, when we tried to board, the door was blocked by a bunch of soldiers unloading crates of something so small and heavy that it had to be ammunition. When we got on, we found more soldiers, who would gradually disembark along the way. One would think the military would have better means of transportation than sleeper class on the Jaisalmer Express, but what do I know? Oh, also, about 20 15-year-olds largely unsupervised. Good times. A scenic ride, though, through some awesome desert.
Jaisalmer is a much smaller town than anything else we’d been to. There’s no airport, and they didn’t film any Bond movies there, so it winds up being less hostile to tourists. This was a far cry from Jaipur, where everyone and his mother wanted you in their rickshaw. The draws here are threefold: the fort (catching a pattern to Rajasthan?), desert tours, and bhang. This fort was unique in that it’s still lived in. It hasn’t been converted lock-stock into a UNESCO site like the rest of the places. It’s just part of the town that happens to be surrounded by walls. No entry fees, and you’re free to explore. You could see everybody’s laundry, right next to guys selling postcards. And since the place is decaying (our guidebook called it an "architectural time bomb") there are all sorts of nooks and crannies to explore. This made it both crowded and private in its different parts.
As mentioned, we also partook of the desert tours. To varying degrees, they jeep you out to the desert, you ride a camel around, and they jeep you back. These range from ultra-touristy evening trips to see the sunset to much more hardcore trips of 2 weeks or longer. We chose the former. Which basically meant we rode some camels around in a circle for an hour, watched the sunset, then drove back. No regrets! This was the only clear sunset we had the whole trip–the only one where we actually saw the sun disappear on the horizon. In every other city, the pollution was so extreme that the sun disappeared long before the horizon. The benefit to those sunsets is that the pollution also makes the sky totally psychadelic, but au naturale has its appeals, too. As for the camel ride, I think an hour was plenty. Those things weren’t exactly comfortable. Or fragrant.
And yeah. Bhang. Bhang is some sort of cannabis product or something. I’m hazy on the details, but according to Wikitravel, they serve it in milkshakes, plus cookies and chocolates as "take-away" packs to bring with you into the desert. Trying out strange Indian drugs while in the middle of the desert near Pakistan didn’t sound like the best laid plan, so Pete and I decided to pass, but we did discover the shop Anthony Bourdain had visited. There’s one legal bhang shop in Jaisalmer, authorized by the government and right next to the fort. We walked by, and it was run by two dudes who’d clearly done too much bhang over the years. If anybody out there watches Tony B, drop me a line if you remember the episode when he gets baked in Rajasthan. I’d love to hear his take on Rajasthani food. And bhang.
Travel tip: there were only two ATMs in Jaisalmer. One was anything but 24hr, and the other was out of cash the first time we tried it. So I do recommend arriving in Jaisalmer with some cash. There were actually plenty of places advertising cash advances against credit cards, but those things are expensive enough in the States. Christ knows the APR for a cash advance in Jaisalmer.
Downtown Jaisalmer:
Pete’s Faces in Places:
Next up: one day in Jodhpur, the blue city.
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