travel journal: Jaisalmer

Another day, another city, another incredible, historic fort feeling the constant grind between efforts to maintain and preserve an aging grandeur and the often scrambling efforts of countless residents to eek out a living. This tension has been nowhere more obvious than in Jaisalmer. The intensity of the architectural beauty and the evocative atmosphere created by the labyrinth of winding golden sandstone lined streets, along with the status of being a cultural epicenter for Rajasthani desert life create a resounding call for tourism. The tiny fort city seems to be at capacity with guesthouses, "continental" palate catering restaurants, and vendors selling a huge range of products - from the standard plethora of cheap knick knacks to many genuine examples of local artistry (as far as I could tell). As far as I've been told, tourism here (and around Rajasthan in general) has exploded over the past 20 years or so and Jaisalmer's centuries old infrastructure is suffering pretty dramatically. But, guilty tourist rant aside, it really is another astonishingly beautiful place.

Yesterday morning we started with a quick breakfast in the hotel's rooftop restaurant (each hotel seems to have its own) and met up with Nandhu to explore the fort on foot. Unlike the other museum-like forts we've visited around Jaisalmer's is essentially a dense city within fort walls, so we spent most of the day slowly meandering through the winding streets and visiting the seven Jain temples buried among them. The most stunning aspects of the city are the countless absurdly intricate carvings in the sandstone exteriors of hundreds of old houses lining the streets. The scores of vendors, in the end, were a minor distraction and in some cases an amusement ("Please just give me one chance to rip you off!", "Don't break my heart, I only have twenty!") as we made our way further into the maze.

We finally have a hotel with a decent wifi connection, so I'm just going to blanket this post with photos.

A slightly closer look

They call this "Brahman Blue"

This guy

Not to be outdone by the amazing intricacy of the fort's homes, the Jain temples had some incredible carvings of their own.

Monkey god

Little snack for the walk home - potato curry wrapped in bread, battered and deep fried. Yummmm

We headed back to the hotel for a short rest before hopping in the car to head about 40km west to the Sam Sand Dunes for a taste of the "Sahara-like" rolling dunes that all the camel safari touts that we've been brushing off have promised.

After a scenic drive through increasingly barren territory, we arrived at the dunes to be immediately accosted with eager faces pressed against our windows trying to sell us camel rides for the couple hundred meters out to the actual dunes. No thanks. Like much of the rest of Jaisalmer, the dunes were covered in locals wandering among the tourists offering various examples of desert culture in exchange for a few rupees (or chocolate, face cream, shampoo, or cigarettes, all of which some asked for when we informed them we had left our cash in the car). In this case there were a number of folk musicians and dancers in brilliant colors giving impromptu shows.

We were about an hour and a half early for the sunset which left plenty of time for goofy pictures.