November 4-8, 2009 – Day 314-317 – Jaisalmer, India

Spent the last several days enjoying to slow, relaxing pace of this small desert town. Our days were lazy and uneventful. If you really, really want to know just what that means, here is an outline: breakfast, internet cafe, lunch, internet cafe, walking around town trying to choose a restaurant for dinner, dinner, going back to our hotel room to avoid the after-dark mosquito militia and playing cards or writing posts until we get sleepy.

That lunch we were talking about

We also finally got around to checking several tour agencies for prices on camel safaris and decided to go with Sahara Travels because we got the best price (after some extra negotiations, of course). Besides that, we did go into the fort a couple times to do a bit of souvenir shopping/postcard buying and had a decent view over the town from a hotel rooftop restaurant that we wandered into for a soda.

Down on the city

The fort is filled with plenty of shops selling everything from bedcovers and wall hangings to postcards, jotis (those pointy toed shoes that are traditional dress in Rajisthan and Punjab too) to little keychains and other Indian motif doo-dads. Although the maharaja has long since relocated his residence, many of the townspeople still live inside the fort walls. There is a maze of tiny yellow alleyways leading to shops, other streets or sometimes right up to someone’s front door. The entire fort is made of sandstone, a nice yellow color that blends into the surrounding desert. It looks fairly small from a distant as well as from inside but that’s because it really is. Still it is fun to walk through the narrow streets, dodging cow pies and the the occasional motorbike expertly speeding past.

Sometimes writing a caption is stupid, like when it's a photo of a fort and the only thing you can really say is. Yup, that's a fort.

Many people come to Jaisalmer to only spend a day or two before going on a camel safari. But really it is a wonderful place to spend several days if you are looking to relax a bit and get away from the hustle and bustle of the bigger cities of India. Sure there are plenty of touts and whizzing rickshaws screeching through the streets and an unusually large amount of cows roaming the market but the overall pace is less hurried and less pushy than many other places you will find in India. We have really enjoyed it!