Jaisalmer – the Golden City

01/08/2013

What a well slept night in our AC2 berths!! It felt like a 5-star hotel!!! =)

We arrived at Jaisalmer close to 12.45 pm (late about 1h30m, but from what we heard it’s normal when coming to this city). Only 40 km away from the border with Pakistan, you can feel the desert heat and some tension in the air with all the troops and military bases nearby. We got off the train to get a rickshaw to get to our hotel, but to our surprise, upon setting foot outside the station, instead of a horde of indians, chaotically trying to fetch a tourist, we face a well organized line of nice looking drivers all holding posters with the name of the hotel they represented and with a sheet of paper with the names of the people they were picking up. We looked closely and…there was this nice boy with an A4 sheet of paper saying “Tokyo Palace Hotel – Diogo Sousa”! =) We’ve got style! =) And we got a jeep this time!! =)

With check-in complete, the hotel owner applied moderate indian style pressure for us to sign up for the hotel’s Camel Safari. So our readers understand he told us we had until 3pm to think about it, which gave us exactly 7 minutes to provide an answer. A true gentleman. We took the scarce minutes to put our backpacks in the room, which by the way, delighted us. With 4 minutes to the deadline, we pleased yet another indian, by accepting the safari without haggling (BIG MISTAKE). Just squeezed out of 3300 rupees (around 40 euros) and starving we headed for the hotel’s restaurant (in the whole of Rajhastan they are typically located on the roof). Blazing hot! Over 40 degrees! Dear friends and readers, we have reached the desert! At least we were getting our first glimpse of the sun in India! =)

Site suggestion: how about reading the remainder of this post to the sound of Sting’s Desert Rose? =)

We were immediately presented with the sight of Jaisalmer’s magnificent fort, unique in Rajhastan since it is the only one still inhabited and this one with thousands of people inside, many of them salespeople of course.
Since we wanted to take a break from indian food, we decided to order a chicken Chow Mein. This complex dish took the two chefs at an empty restaurant a good and short 50 minutes to cook and serve…As a result, we mostly ate chapatis. How we miss our Porto’s “Fu Sheng”, “Asian Star” and alikes.

This is a cute place, Jaisalmer is unlike anything we have seen so far. It’s more like a small town (but with the same cow-to-human ratio) and without the constant honking and chaos of the bigger cities. The landscape is entirely made of golden tones, sand colour and sandstone buildings.

We climbed to the fort close to dinner time (10 strenuous minutes walking), with a small cricket match in between to which we were invited to by some street kids. Some small talk with the locals, who still keep presuming we are spanish and we ended up having dinner at this tibetan restaurant (rooftop also) with a magnificent view from the fort to the city. This time we had a delicious meal, chicken and veg dumplings and chicken curry with the regular rotis. The small rooftop had 3 tables with tourists only, 2 french, 2 italians and 2 portuguese. As soon as we realized the italians were from Padova and the guy had a pair of “Many” shoes on (as lots of other tourists we saw when climbing to the fort) the conditions were set for a pleasant conversation, in which the word Berlusconi was heard a few times (and not in his favour). The italian guy was saying the mafia times were better than present time, in his own words “Italians don’t have bad policies…we simply have no policies at all!”.
We ended up exchanging trip tips with each person talking about his/her experience, and with one of the french guaranteeing us that New Zealand was one of the places not to miss in this world! We plan not to!

02/08/2013

8 hours before we enter the desert.

We climbed the fort to buy some appropriate desert clothing, since we were advised to take some Ali Baba style pants. When we packed we chose to stock up more on the Xanax and less on camel-riding wear! =)
We entered the store of this young man, aka António Banderas (self-entitled) who stroke us as a more western-style salesman.
The rather nice Chagal Mali (the so-called Antonio Banderas) is part of the Mali caste. This is an “average” caste in the caste ranking system, known for its devotion to agriculture (fruits, flowers and vegetables mostly).

We were shown hundreds of pants in different textiles, different colours, all overrated! We ended up spending a pleasant hour with AB, rather academic, and we had another chance to train our negotiation skills. They are not quite there yet, but definitely improving.
A good negotiation in India has to make the salesman more or less mad at you (if he/she was really pissed, there would be no sale, so you know you’d had a good negotiation). For the moment, since we are talking and learning so much from them, we feel bad lowering and lowering the price afterwards. However, it is crucial we keep reminding ourselves that what we are actually doing is reducing their profit margin from obscene amounts to very high amounts.
Regardless, our Banders offered us the traditional Masala Chai and we kept asking him loads of questions that were popping up.

Notes of the day::
– Jaisalmer Fort was built by Maharaja Jaisal Singh, hence the name Jaisalmer;
– Inside the fort and around Jaisalmer the Jain have built a series of temples; Jains were one of the higher castes and were received by the Maharaja inside the fort, in exchange for money to help build it; interesting to know that the symbol representing this caste is the same symbol used by the Nazis – the swastika;
– During the Maharaja’s time, lower castes could not trade, so they build underground tunnels to transport goods and trade without being seen!

Banderas also explained the origin of the different tissues cashmere, pashmina and shahtoosh, this last one a result of a rather horrendous ritual, with which not all indians agree with…we feel the same! It’s production has to be approved by the Government, since it requires the blood and insides of a baby from type of goat that lives in the mountains. The product bears a strong smell and prices start from 650 euros. It’s a niche product, searched by well, different people usually.

At the end we bought two pairs of pants which you will soon see in this post. We asked for a lunch recommendation from Banderas and we took us to the recently openend restaurant of a friend of his, Kahn, where we had our first delicious vegetarian chow mein for two for the price of 1,20€! Kahn was very nice and we took some pictures with him and the restaurant, while promising to help him promote “The Little Prince” on Tripadvisor!

Back to the hotel to get some rest, 2 hours before our departure to the desert.

Just to give you an idea, we paid 3300 rupees and the program was as follows: departure at 16h and we would take about 2 hours to reach the desert. We would camp there for the night and come back around 11.30 am.
About 1 hour jeep ride to get to a Jain temple and stop by a local desert people village and another hour to get to our resting place riding a camel..

The tour started with a first stop at an allegedly Jain temple, which was in fact a small square wall guarding an even smaller altar at the center…at our first stop they were trying to get us to pay 100 rupees each to get in, which we delicately declined. Same for the japanese travelling with us, from Hokkaido, who didn’t speak a lot of English and most of the time smoked his mentol cigarettes contemplating the desert. We stopped in a small village, really small, with 10 people only, a single family of mother, father, 4 sons and 4 daughters. The interesting part was trying to understand how these people lived here specially when looking inside the water well that didn’t look very good…