I remain absolutely riveted. Thank you for all the time it must take to pull all these wonderful pictures and text together.

Your report and the comments of others is making all the preparations for my own trip so much more exciting. I have added Jaigarh fort to our Jaipur plans and cannot wait until you get to Jodhpur where I have just booked.

I remain absolutely riveted. Thank you for all the time it must take to pull all these wonderful pictures and text together.

Your report and the comments of others is making all the preparations for my own trip so much more exciting. I have added Jaigarh fort to our Jaipur plans and cannot wait until you get to Jodhpur where I have just booked.

LOL Dgunbug. THe driver that trip a fantastic young man from Madurai named CM Suresh. He drove Innovas for Indianpanorama, but later became an "independent contractor." I go again, I will ask if IP can book him. I know...amazing, isn't it? Not just the speaking but being able to read the signs in different languages. When we met him, his goal was to get enough money to pay his sister's dowry, as his father had died. I heard that all of Indianpanorama's drivers chipped in so that he was able to give his sister a beautiful wedding.

If you 've had a a great driver, which you did...you know HOW much that can add to a trip. I will never, ever forget how much we learned, how safe and protected we felt, with our drivers. Suresh and Pradeep Rana, the driver on the next trip (to Himachal Pradesh) wouldn't even let us use the loo in an unknown place until they'd checked on it, although they usually knew from yrs of experience the cleanest places for a pit stop!

CaliNurse,
I'm so glad you're enjoying the photos and that they're bringing back great memories of your own amazing India experiences.

Those foggy photos are just that - incredibly thick morning fog, not dust or pollution. It really cooled things off! Only happened one morning, though.

I don't know the meaning of the "slightly cross-eyed mother holding baby with arrow", but I'm looking into it and will let you know if I get results. I thought the odd proportions of the baby were similar to how babies were portrayed in the west prior to the Renaissance - like miniature adults. I think he is also holding a container of Milk Duds...

Yup, those signs in India can be really something. And that suggestive movie poster is part of a set of movies. I took more snapshots out the window as we passed them which I thought were amusing, so I'll be posting them.


loncall,
One good thing about doing this TR is that it is motivating me to go faster through the huge pile of photos I took! And happy to hear you find all this useful and interesting - that's also a great motivator for me to keep going!

After a brief stay near Bikaner, which I will post very soon, I'll be writing about our stay in Jaisalmer, and then on to Jodphur.

<b> Bikaner, Gajner and the road to Jaisalmer
Photos are here:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/129067...57668581900221
They show more if you make them large!</b>

I read an item in the news that caught my eye:
On January 26 we took IndiGo flight 6E-237 from Chennai to Jaipur.
On February 27 the pilots on IndiGo flight 6E-237 from Chennai to Jaipur tried to land on a road next to the Jaipur airport instead of the runway, until an automatic warning system alerted them to their mistake! They've since been suspended.
The exact same flight on the same airline that we took, one month later, almost to the day.
Odd.

http://www.news18.com/news/india/ind...d-1246747.html


Anyway, back to the trip report:

In the morning we woke to find we were immersed in thick pearly fog.
Pea soup.
I went out early shooting, but there was only so much I could do in such low visibility, although the fog imparted a moodiness that was beautiful.

The first couple of hours of the drive to Bikaner was slow. India's challenging roads become that much more "interesting" when one's driver has to abruptly swerve to avoid a camel suddenly popping out of the thick fog as it ambled down the road. That road soon became a rocky washboard. We <strike>drove</strike> bounced and rattled through a number of villages, and in-between were stretches of arid ochre landscapes interrupted by the dark ghostly silhouettes of Khejri trees in the fog , skeletal from having had most of their branches and leaves loped off by villagers for firewood.

Gradually the fog burned off and the road improved, and the number of kilometers to Bikaner on the road markers got smaller and smaller. I hadn't done any real research as to where to eat lunch, but knew there was supposed to be an "adequate" place close to the fort, so when our driver suggested that same place, we just said OK. I was unusually tired, and the bland lunch didn't increase my energy. We crossed the road to the red stone Bikaner Fort. One of its unique claims is that it has never been sacked, so as a result it is remarkably intact. Hmmm, sounds like an advertising slogan:
Never been sacked, remarkably intact!"

The fort had great beauty, but my fatigue prevented me from doing it justice, and afterwards we skipped the famous Jain temple and what I'd anticipated as a memorable walk through the backstreets of the old quarter and instead just headed for our hotel in the village of Gajner, past Bikaner on the road to Jaisalmer.

Our hotel, the Gajner Palace is smack in the middle of a leafy oasis situated at the edge of the Thar desert, and had originally been built as the hunting lodge of the Maharaja of Bikaner and visiting British dignitaries during the days of the Raj. Spread over 6000 acres and situated by a lake, it attracts many birds and much wildlife. The barren drive down the sandy dirt road off the highway didn't look promising, but suddenly we were under the trees and ahead was a palace-like building. The red sandstone hotel seemed a mix of India and Victorian, and again we found our hotel was an attraction in itself (sense a theme emerging here?).

Walking through the interior courtyard of the hotel on the way to see our room, I heard C gasp and look up, and there on branch above us were 2 of the sweetest little owls, sleepily cuddling. Little fuzzy adult owls, each about the size of a cantaloupe. The manager told us they had become long-term residents of the hotel. They were becoming a celebrity couple! Being nocturnal they would try to sleep, but were continually woken by the commotion of the many carousing parrots dive-bombing around them, and the owls when woken would look daggers at the offending parrot, their bright yellow eyes flashing. I have an amusing sequence of photos photos of the owls being annoyed by the parrots in the new album.

Again I requested a room on the ground floor to save C's knees for stairs at places yet to come. Our room looking out on the lake was lovely, and a change of pace due to the Victorian-style interiors. If we'd had more time/energy, we could have taken a safari to see desert wildlife or gone out on the lake on one of their small boats. As it was, just being there with all that greenery by the lake was very refreshing after the last few days of arid landscapes. Although the food wasn't the best, overall we thought it was a great place to stay between Jaipur and Jaisalmer.

We only stayed one night, and the next morning we were on the long road to Jaisalmer. I'd contemplated stopping on the way at Kolayat to see the ghats, but by the time I remembered to ask about it, we were already 30 minutes past the turn, and the 6 hour drive ahead of us dissuaded me from asking to turn around. We did make the stop at about the mid-way point to see the Demoiselle Cranes who come to in Khichan. It is an easy stop well worth making, just a few minutes off the main road. When we arrived there was just one person there, a man who to whom we gave a donation for the care of the crane sanctuary. Every year during their migration, about 20,000 cranes visit the small village. They started coming because some kind village residents were feeding grain to local pigeons, but word got out along the animal grapevine, first to other pigeons, squirrels and peacocks, and then to a few cranes who chanced upon the village. Word of beak prompted more and more cranes to arrive.

As we were sitting down on a bench overlooking the throngs of cranes, a local dog came bounding across the sand toward them, prompting the cranes to take flight from the shore of a lake, giving me a chance to get some crane-in-flight shots. Surprised the dog didn't ask for a tip. We stayed longer that I would have guessed, just two humans enjoying the sight of an astounding number of blue cranes on the reddish sand. But Jaisalmer was calling, and the sudden arrival of a big tour bus and it's subsequent unloading was sufficient motivation to get us back on the road.

(coming up next, Jaisalmer)

delightful photos again, especially the birds. I just love the owls, and the cranes too.

Agree with Annihig..........GREAT photos, especially of the the birds...both sitting and in flight. The India airline reputation make me a bit nervous. Was told by my cousin who lived in Mumbai to take Jet Air if possible as the training of the pilots on the other airlines in India is not as thorough. Plus, there are a lot more accidents that occur with the other airlines in India. So, I held my breath when we could only take Air India from Jodhpur to New Delhi. It was 4 hours late (as predicted by reputation) and was an older airplane............. So your short verse on Indigo was not surprising..................

Looking forward to more reading.........thanks again for taking the time to post....

I also loved your bird pictures as well as the fog. Enjoyed seeing the typical art work on the vehicle you photographed. How did you like the northern Indian food compared to the southern cooking?

Calinurse - our driver also told us that he had to pay for his sister's wedding. On top of that, her husband had recently died and he was supporting her as well as his wife and sick baby who needed an operation for a cleft palate. My husband and I were a bit suspect that all this information may have been a ploy to elicit a larger tip - we were uncertain as to the validity of the info, but it had no bearing on the generous tip that we paid him for his great service and information, which we would have given gladly anyway.

Rje, LOL the box of milk duds. So THAT's what the miniature Hindi writing says!! Btw, who's the gorgeous woman, dressed in black, in the hotel bathroom?

Dgun, maybe we're a naive, but I doubt your driver invented the story, and I would have taken him at face value. I didnt think then that our driver invented his story, and got the confirmation yrs later hearing about the dowry-chip in. That driver's father had been killed in a bus accident.
In a brief visit to Rwanda, the young woman hotel housekeeper told me of being an orphan since childhood-- both her parents had been killed twenty yrs earlier.(She didnt go into details, but knowing the history of the conflict in Rwanda, she didnt have to.) Or the guide at the fascinating Bigodi Swamp in Uganda who told me his grandparents had raised him after both his parents had died of AIDS, which is what inspired him to start a small orphanage for children in a similar tragic situation. In India and other third world countries, there is daily tragedy and difficulty, that people accept as just pat of life (role of religion, among other factors?) that we, in our very comfortable lives here, don't encounter as continually, and learn about from movies, distant news story, etc.

Like you, I don't tip based on those stories, but on the level of service. Sounds like our driver was a gem and deserved every bit of your generosity!

Rje - re: the airlines - pretty scary. I'm of two minds - try avoiding flying in areas where the air safety record is subpar or take your risks and enjoy life. When your time is up, it's meant to be. We chose to take trains a lot, especially if the air safety is an issue. Unfortunately, my husband is more the worry wort than I am and he refuses to fly now in Indonesia and Myanmar due to pilot and aircraft safety records.

I'm more nervous about taking trains than flying In India, although i've taken a bunch of short an long haul trains and loved the experience---mice and all!! Check out the list of India's rail accidents over the years.(Do NOT show Mr. Dgunbug!) The horrific opening scenes in "The Namesake" (film) were not fiction.
I'm with your husband , when flight records justify worry. And I will never fly into Mangalore--altough it is quite convenient for a trip down the coast to northern Kerala--as it is said to be the most dangerous landing approach airport in the world.
One of the post-erd on the USA/Hawaii forum did sky-dived out of a plane on Kauai. Very shortly after--a week or less?-- the same company's plane crashed--five died, including her pilot and instructor. As if my job doesn't remind me of it every day, you just never know...

Back to RJE...awaiting Jaiselmer!!!!

Many many thank yous, shukriyas, and danyavads,RJE, as your wonderful writing continues. Love your report's interspersed humorous reflections. Great fort slogan. The "word of beak" process amongst the feathered friends reads like a description of how tourism has ruined some once-peaceful areas of the world! The joy of safari: parrots, which we Americans see in cages, out in the open!!

I didn't stop the TR, but we were away for the long weekend. Almost done with the Jaisalmer segment, will post either tomorrow or the next day.

annhig,
Thanks! And if you like owls, wait 'til you see the photo from Narlai of a huge owl at dusk!

dragon88,
Much appreciated! I was surprised how many different birds we saw in India. I'll be posting some from Jaisalmer, too.

dgunbug,
<i>How did you like the northern Indian food compared to the southern cooking?</i>

I guess I liked the food differently by region more than by north VS south. Some of our favorite food were Kerala dishes and the Mangalorean cuisine we had in Mumbai. But looked at purely as north/south, I probably like more dishes from the north.

Which regions are your favorites?

CaliNurse,
You're right about Indian train safety, and yet the odds are still greatly against being in the wrong place at the wrong time, so I guess I'll still take them! As I wrote on another thread, they're a mini-adventure! And a great way to meet people.

Parrots! I loved watching their antics, and they are beautiful, but if I had to live with (and hear!) so many all-year long, I might change my mind!

Rje - we preferred the food in the north, especially the spinach paneer which was much different in the south. It was fun trying different dishes...always a joy when traveling.

Looking forward to your next edition.

Looking forward to your last segment. It looks as if you stayed at Devi Gahr.

dgunbug,
Mmmm, love spinach paneer! It is usually called saag paneer here in NYC, but we learned on this trip that saag doesn't specifically mean spinach in India! It refers to any leafy green vegetable.

crosscheck,
Yes we did stay at Devi Garh. Right before Udaipur and then Mumbai.

<b>Jaisalmer
Photos are here:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/129067...57669046669675
They show more if you make them large!</b>


Google maps said the drive to Jaisalmer would take 4 hours. Bad Google, you lie! As Nikhil had warned us, it took over 6 hours, and the relatively good road was frequently interrupted by inexplicable short stretches where it had been torn up, requiring slowing to less than 10 mph to navigate the rocks and sand. Why would the India Road Department not just work on one single stretch and then finish it, rather than do it in such a ridiculously piecemeal fashion, making for the maximum frustration?

We were driving somewhere along the edge of the Thar desert when Raj exclaimed "Look", pointing ahead to some dots far up by the road. It was a group of adolescent Nilgai, the largest Asian antelope. I grabbed for my camera, and as we got closer, they bounded casually across the road in single-file. I got off a quick burst of shots through the windshield before they disappeared into some scrubby brush. Not bad for through-the windshield photos while driving at about 60 mph! Had we gone on an actual game safari we would have likely seen them, but it was a treat to just have them unexpectedly appear on our drive. (photos in album)

Since we'd left Jaipur, we would sometimes pass green fields full of small yellow flowers. The sight of fresh green color amid the arid landscapes was a refreshing contrast, and Raj told us they were mustard plants. It seems like anywhere people had a little spare land they'd plant mustard. The plants provide a double crop, yielding both the seeds and and the mustard greens.

As we approached Jaisalmer we passed several big military bases built after one of the wars with Pakistan. Jaisalmer is very close to Pakistan and a couple of weeks before there had been an over-the-border raid by terrorists upon an Indian Air Force base in Punjab, so tensions were high, as it was feared another might happen. It seemed likely the reason was to try and ruin recent thaws between India and Pakistan, as Modi had just visited the Prime Minister of Pakistan. I thought about how close we were to Pakistan, and how an attack on a tourist hotel might make sense strategically to certain elements there. Then I stopped thinking about it!

The drive to Jaisalmer being so long makes it even more frustrating that there is a new Jaisalmer airport that never even opened, and is now being described as a ghost airport. Turns out there is not enough demand to keep it profitable, as Jaisalmer tourism pretty much shuts down for the summer due to oven-like temperatures. So they spent all that money, but the airlines weren't interested. And the government had second thoughts about having an airport so close to Pakistan, as it was decided to be vulnerable to shoulder-fired missiles. Sadly there are many other such airports in India, like the ones at Pondicherry and Mysore, which also closed quickly due to lack of profitability.
Here's an article with some photos of the Jaisalmer ghost airport:
http://www.businessinsider.com/take-...airport-2015-8
And a more general look at the many ghost airports in India:
http://in.reuters.com/article/india-...0QN2BV20150819

We were originally going to stay 3 nights in Jaisalmer inside the Fort walls at a tiny hotel called Killa Bhawan. But I was unsure about how tired we'd be after the long drive to Jaisalmer, and then when we arrived having to load our luggage (and selves) into a tuk-tuk, as cars can't fit the narrow road/ramp through the gate into the fort. It just seemed safer to opt for reliable comfort outside the fort for the first night, so we stayed at the 1st Gate, a hotel with a mix of modern and old Jaisalmer style.

Our room was a mix of modern and old too, and everything worked well. Unfortunately a family in a neighboring house would have a party later that night, and the unholy mix of disco, techno and thrash music at high decibels made our comfortable bed a cruel joke.
But before that, we dined on the hotel roof with the dramatic floodlit fort looming right over us, blissfully unaware of what the night would serve us later. The owner of the hotel is a very nice Italian woman named Federica​, and she's somehow created a place that manages to serve a half-decent wood-fired pizza in this desert town so close to Pakistan. Maybe not the pizza of Naples, but a nice change of pace.

And since we were outside the fort, the next morning we first went to admire some of the deservedly famous havelis of Jaisalmer. Our third haveli stop was Patwaon Ki Haveli, probably the most famous, and it is actually a group of havelis, all together on a narrow street. Raj, our driver got us almost there when a policeman stopped us. We were still a few blocks away, and C was having trouble walking that day, so I asked Raj if he could explain the situation to him. He spoke to the policeman at length in Hindi, and suddenly the officer got into our car.
<i>He will drive with us</i> Raj said.
When we arrived at the closest possible point, we stopped and Raj said <i>Give him money</i>.
<i>How much?'</i> I asked.
<i>100 Rupees</i> he replied. So I did.

Those sandstone havelis are gorgeous and are indeed carved as delicately and intricately as lace. We encountered a bit of low-key hustling from street touts outside, but they were my favorite kind of tout - easily discouraged. Just a "Nahi" accompanied by a lack of eye contact was enough to make them slink off.

I was curious about what the rear of the havelis looked like, so I walked around to the street facing the back and discovered that it was another world back there. It was the start of a residential neighborhood with no tourists, and I wandered down those narrow streets for a while, looking at less opulent but still beautifully carved havelis that were being lived in, and enjoying the local street life. Since they get far less tourists on these streets, the people were curious and friendly.

After I met up with C back at the haveli, we got the police escort out again (apparently that 100 Rupees got us a round-trip) and then went to switch to our hotel inside the fort, Killa Bhawan, perched high on the battlements of the fort, with amazing views looking over at the nearby Palace and down at the town spread out below us.

We loved the multiple terraces where we could eat, photograph and just <i>be</i>. The view is similar to what the visitors to the palace have for a short time. But we had it at many different times of day, allowing us to admire the ever-changing light on the palace and town far below. As the sun set, it's fading light emblazoned the honey-colored sandstone buildings with a red glow. A young girl was setting up her tightrope act below us, similar to what we'd seen on the beach at Pondicherry years before. And a handsome raptor with beautiful markings would often soar close by us, sometimes at eye-level. He was pursuing scores of pigeons who would begin swirling in the sky when they spotted his approach. Luckily for us, we never saw him actually catch any of them (No pigeons were harmed in the making of these photos!). Local people called them "hawks", but if anyone who sees my pictures knows it's specific name, please let me know. And being high over the town buffered us from the more unwelcome sounds while allowing a soft melange of distant melodies to waft up to us.

The guys who worked at the hotel were so friendly and helpful, and offered to bring us menus and food from the local restaurants so we had incredibly romantic dinners under the big desert moon on our terrace. There was also a room right outside our room that no one used but us, with beautiful rugs and artwork and a couch, and on one chilly early morning we had our breakfast of fruit and goat cheese omelets brought there.

I discovered that they were mostly from Nepal, and would work in Jaisalmer for part of the year, sending money home. I asked the guy I spoke to most frequently if his family back in Nepal were all right after the earthquakes. He told me they were, but their house had been damaged. I would have tipped him well anyway, just for the great friendly service, but how could I not make it substantially better after hearing that? I think his name is Manu.

The hotel was a multi-level maze of several connected former houses, but with only a few guest rooms. Being located on a residential street inside the fort meant that we got to see a lot of local daily life. It was charming to see a girl from the house next door come out to feed chapati to a sweet big-eyed honey-brown cow who appeared at her front door every afternoon (photo in album). Manish, the friendly hotel manager told me that it was about karma. People would often give cows the first and last batch of chapati they made, and the cows know what houses will give them chapati, and make the rounds each day! We were to see the same cow/chapati scenario in several other towns.

The family in the house on the other side of our room were hosting wedding celebrations of their son, and while we didn't go to that wedding, we were still enjoying their music, the comings and goings of guests in beautiful clothing, and the lights that they draped on their house. One night they even lowered strings of lights down the walls outside our room, enveloping us in a glowing rainbow! One night of that was enough, though! We'd later have a small taste of a huge wedding in Bundi, complete with numerous elephants.

I asked Manish for directions to the group of Jain temples inside the fort, and it turned out they were only a 5-minute walk away. His good advice was to arrive by 8am, before the first tourists. We walked along quiet stone streets which glistened as women washed them, empty of tourists… except for us. And the Jain temple was also empty save for the priest who greeted us. The silence inside the temple greatly enhanced the mood. Without the sounds of tourists, it was broken only by the gentle tinkling of small bells above us moving in the breeze. Incredible stone carvings, with similarities to the Jain temple at Ranakpur, but smaller and more intimate. A lovely experience. As we were leaving, the first groups of the day arrived.

We kept seeing mysterious round sandstone boulders sitting in rows all over tops of the fort walls. Turns out, they're there to be thrown down on invaders in case of attack. Ouch.

We're so glad we made the effort to go to Jaisalmer. We kept vacillating about whether we should go all that way. We had no interest in some of the most common reasons for going, like taking a camel caravan - especially since C hates the desert! But the architecture alone made the drive worth it for us, and we came to really like the town. There are certainly tourist shops, but somehow we found them easier to look past than in some other places we've traveled to where they spoiled the whole ambiance. And there are many parts where you won't see any at all. Yes, Jaisalmer must have been even more amazing 50 years ago, but then so would, say, Hanoi have been, before motorcycles mostly replaced bicycles, and we still like it there, too. But Jaisalmer is far, and it takes some time to immerse yourself, so I think it needs at least 3 nights.

Afterwards we learned that tourists staying in the fort can put a strain on the delicate infrastructure of the old fort, but since we were already sensitive about not using a lot of water, I'd like to think that we didn't leave much of a footprint.

(coming up next, Jodphur)

As ever, thank you for the superb photos [the undersides of the eagles are as good as any I've ever seen] and for the detail in your writing - I really feel that I'm there with you.

And another place I'd never thought of visiting suddenly seems like a must.

Again, stunning pictures. We also spent 3 days in Jaisalmar and we're glad that we had made the effort. It's a fascinating city.

Again, really appreciate the effort you are putting into the report with the details. And wow to the intricacies of the architecture in your photos.