Message #11: Jaisalmer

(Message sent Fri, 10 Nov 2006 02:50:49 -0700)

Hello everyone. I've spent the last few days in and around the small desert town of Jaisalmer. This is one of the places I was particularly looking forward to, and it hasn't disappointed. The town's main feature is its fort, built on a low flat escarpment in the 12th Century. The town itself subsequently followed, built on the plains at the base of the escarpment.

The fort is roughly triangular in plan, and the walls take the form of 99 round bastions standing very close together, connected by short straight sections of wall. A low outer wall sits right on the edge of the escarpment and follows the bumpy contour of the bastions.

Everything was built using large blocks of golden sandstone, and the place just looks magnificent gleaming in the desert sun. The fort is very imposing, and dominates the view from most parts of town.

The inside of the fort is a warren of alleyways, with temples and palaces scattered about. You get into the fort via a narrow twisting road that takes you under a series of three or four massive gateways.

The area inside the fort is one big tourist bazaar, but fortunately the sellers are nowhere near as pushy as elsewhere, so it is perfectly possible to get agreeably lost in the maze.

As everywhere the sellers try ludicrously to convince you just to look at their wares, that they're not that fussed whether you buy anything or not. One guy got a laugh (but not a sale) out of me by taking a more direct approach. "Sir! Are you looking for a place to spend all your money?"

In the heart of the fort is an interconnected series of Jain temples. These are small and ornately carved, and have bats living in the ceiling spaces. The experience is spoilt by the money thing though. The temples swarm with nominally holy men, who latch on to you and alternate between pointing out obvious things and pleading for money. This is on top of paying an entry fee and a camera-use fee. There are even signs up saying, "Please don't tip the holy men," which I found very peculiar. But still they try for every rupee they can. I guess it's just a cultural difference, but this never-ending and unsubtle demand for money makes everything feel base and sordid.

So the fort is crammed with trinket sellers, pedestrians, motorbikes, 'holy men', dogs, and cows. Cows everywhere, wandering about, pooping where-so-ever they please, attempting to eat pretty much everything in sight. My sheltered life in NZ did not prepare me for one hazard I faced: a cow jam. A particularly narrow alley had a door from someone's house open to it. A cow had poked its head inside, presumably looking for food. Another two cows had wedged themselves behind the first one, completely blocking the lane. Not being much of a farm boy I didn't even know which end of a cow is least likely to attack you if you try to push past it, so I just stood there pathetically making ineffectual shoo! motions.

A man came to my rescue, rearranging the cows so that I could get past. Of course, the man then tried to sell me textiles at special, just-for-you prices, but that's OK.

For me, forts are all about the walls themselves, and I love to walk along the ramparts. For some reason you're almost never allowed to do this in Indian forts. Since the Jaisalmer Fort's walls have stayed intact for 800 years I had hoped that I would be able to circumnavigate the whole fort along its walls. This turned out not to be possible, although for entirely unexpected reasons.

Because the main tourist emphasis is in the center of the fort, the area just inside the outer wall has become the town's rubbish tip. So when I first set off along the walls I was wading through trash and worse. This was bad enough, but because it's a rubbish tip it's also therefore a place where poor people live. I soon came across makeshift fireplaces, makeshift toilets, and clutches of wretched things that made it clear that it was, in effect, someone's house I was hiking through. It didn't feel right, so I had to content myself with circumnavigating the fort via the road at the base of the escarpment. This was still a really impressive walk, as the fort looms above you and is never out of sight for a moment.

My delight at being here must be showing. At one stage I was sitting on the edge of one of the bastions, just staring out over the town, when a dutch woman came up to me spontaneously and said, "You look happy!"

And on top of all this coolness I am staying in a palace! The place was built by a maharaja in 1899, using the same golden sandstone used to build the fort itself. It's costing me 3000 rupees a night to stay there, which is three times what I usually pay, but it's still only NZ$100 a night, so why not stay in a palace every now and then?

You know you've had a good day when it ends with you watching the sun set into the desert from a rooftop restaurant in a magnificent fort, and then you wander down the hill to your palace for the night!

For you Google Earthers, here are two cannons for you to find:

26 54.750 N 070 54.875 E

26 55.046 N 070 54.199 E

The first reading was taken at a cannon on one of the bastions of the fort, while the second was taken at a cannon in the grounds of my palace.

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