Jaisalmer - boy

The 19 hour "express" from Delhi to Jaisalmer was a bit of a struggle. It consisted of open carriages divided into several units with eight beds in each one; so a lot of squeezing of selves and luggage into small places going on. When we noticed everyone chaining their luggage to special points in the carriage we realised that chains were something we forgot to buy beforehand so had a fitful night keeping our non-sleeping eye on our large rucksacks and sleeping on our small ones. To help us stay awake our neighbour ensured his mobile phone would ring at least a hundred times throughout the night with an especially irritating Bollywood melody. He must have guessed our predicament.

This city is probably one of the most relaxing places I've been to in India (I had been before for a few months, not just to Delhi). Perfection would probably mean putting huge unfixable holes in the tyres of Jaisalmer's million or so motorbikes so they couldn't swerve in and out of people on the narrow streets constantly beeping their horns, but I'm probably naive to think that a flat tyre would stop these guys anyway. The cows however seem oblivious to all this; they seem to be quite happy lying in the middle of the road eating the detritus left on the ground. It's amazing really; cardboard, paper, dirty rags go in; milk comes out. And the Lassies do taste good (drink, not Scottish women).

We were lucky enough to be here during the Holi festival; celebrating the start of spring and killing daemons or something like that. It is one of the few times you can walk the streets with no traffic and the only price you pay is being covered from head to tow with a large selection of coloured powers. Rajasthan is always described by the guidebooks as a colourful place but this is ridiculous. Today, the end of lunar such and such (1^st March 2010 for the rest of us),  the people turn it up a notch by saturating the town and everyone in it all the primary colours and everything in between including luminous yellow and radioactive green. We knew we'd get a pasting when we went out and even bought our own bags of 'throwing powder' so we could get our own back. There was a lot of smearing powder on the face and body too, which I was previously warned about the day before. 'You will have to protect your wife from the crazy guys on bang [ganga, weed, etc] who will run up and down molesting women'. And he wasn't wrong. I guess that's what happens when all the (undoubtedly) sexually repressed teenagers in a small town have an excuse to touch the opposite sex. It's a lot clearer now why most Indian teenage girls were more or less separate from these guys and did their own thing in their own groups. Now the day is over and we are trying to wash the stuff off we realise that this may be some kind of dye. Mmm, we were warned about that too so can't complain really.

As for attractions; the large sandcastle fort was large, impressive and busy; the museum (at the old Maharaja's Palace) interesting and informative; the Desert tour (without camel) mediocre (we seem to be keeping a quota of one crap desert tour per week); the Jain temples all around extremely ornate and the priests within sufficiently irritating with the hard sell - or hard 'give us a donation'. On the last point I should say that there is already an entrance fee to the temples, plus a fee if you want to take pictures, plus a fee if you want to walk round with your eyes open, plus there's a big sign saying 'Don't give the priests any money'. I did try and point this out but I don't speak Hindi and they don't speak English, which makes me wonder who put the signs there in the first place; the Indian tourist board perhaps? I'm sure business will boom when they realise and remove the signs. Anyway, rant over.

As with Delhi, we had an array of amazing curries with only a light sprinkling of bacteria in a couple as my gut will attest.