Message #14: Jodhpur

(Message sent Sun, 12 Nov 2006 22:33:13 -0700)

I'm in Jodhpur, a town so freaking amazing that I can hardly stand it. Once again the main feature is the fort, but oh my, what a fort. I had thought that I had seen the best that India had to offer in this regard, but Jodhpur's just blows the others off their hillsides, with an immense Wall rising up from a rocky, craggy knoll.

My hotelier claims that his place has the best view of the fort in town, and I can believe it. The view is completely unobstructed, and at just the right distance: far enough away that you can take the whole thing in, close enough that you can get an idea of how huge it is. (It takes a while to convince yourself that the tiny specs at the top are in fact people.)

Getting to the hotel was a bit of a mission in itself. I had chosen a place out of the guidebook, but when I got there it was full. The proprietor offered to arrange for me to stay at another place, and said that the other hotel would arrange a pickup for me. Both the intended and the eventual hotels are in the old part of town, where the roads are so narrow that cars can't easily pass, so I was expecting an auto-rickshaw to pick me up, but it turned out to be a young lad on a motorbike. I wasn't at all happy about riding through bonkers Indian traffic on a bike, but there wasn't much choice, so I got on and off we went, scooting down narrow lanes, dodging the cows, mingling with the other motorbikes and tooting at the pedestrians. Me with my full pack on and neither of us wearing helmets! But we got there without incident.

The hotel is one of those places that I suspect could only be built in a land with lax building-code enforcement. It consists of two stacks of blue-painted mismatched rooms, connected by a bewildering collection of stairs and bridges.

The hotelier took me up to the roof of one of the stacks and I got my first glimpse of the fort, which just blew my mind. Then he showed me my room and my poor brains got addled all over again. He proudly told me about how he had had an entire ancient temple shipped from Jaisalmer and re-erected on top of one of the stacks to serve as a guest room! I was so shell-shocked that I agreed to take the room before I had thought through the ethical considerations of such a venture, but taking a closer look at the stonework convinced me that it was actually all of modern creation, designed to look all ancienty and temple-y. So I am living in a golden sandstone faux ancient temple perched atop a stack of blue hotel rooms with a view from the carved stone bed of the most amazing fort you can imagine. I guess it will have to do.

Oh, and the hotel also has a pet turtle called Sophia who spends her time crawling about the roof-top restaurant trying not to get stepped on.

Jodhpur old town is a fun place to wander around. It's a jumble of narrow lanes lined with small shops. The streets, while still filthy by New Zealand standards, are OK by Indian standards, and the hawkers seem less desperate and more full of good humour than elsewhere.

For example, at one stage I found myself caught up in the Great Jodhpur Omelette War. The Egg Man has been selling omelettes from a grotty little booth for over 30 years. Recently a pretender to the Egg King throne has emerged in the form of a young whippersnapper called Vicky, who has set up a competing outfit not four metres from the old guy. Both 'shops' consist of a huge stack of egg crates and a pan over a gas flame, out in the open by the road.

I happened to wander innocently into this friendly turf war, and was immediately set-upon by touts from both incumbent and pretender, keen to show me guest books in which people from all over the world extolled the virtues of one man's omelettes over the other. Vicky was so confident of his product that he encouraged my to buy from the Egg Man first, and then from him, so I could see how much better his omelettes were. So I dutifully ate two masala-cheese omelettes. They were served between two pieces of toast like a sandwich, wrapped in pieces of newspaper, and eaten from grubby plastic stools in the road, with people and motorbikes and, yes, cows going past. (In fact one cow with important business elsewhere blundered past and shoved my off my stool.)

I declared the competition a draw, but to be honest I think the old man had the edge.

Now back to the fort. It has a resident astrologer. Well, why shouldn't a fort have a resident astrologer? So I decided to get a reading done. He turned out to be an astro-palmist (?!?), and he deduced my personality and told my future by reading my palm, with the help of magnifying glass, protractor, and calculator.

So, I have found out that I am sensitive (it takes me a long time to recover from bad experiences), careful (I always double-check that my hotel rooms are securely locked, and keep a close eye on my wallet when in a crowd), and short-tempered (quick to anger, quick to cool down).

In terms of my health, I will die at 83 (this determined with a protractor) and I will suffer from high blood pressure at ... (rattle of keys on calculator) ... 57.

I will encounter the love of my life at age 44, although someone else will come along at 40 or 41. The 41-event and the 44-event might in fact be the same person (the one might 'coalesce' into the other), or it may be someone else - he couldn't be sure.

Oh, and I need to eat more calcium.

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