Raj-ing It: Full Stop

Thursday 1st May

- time to catch up

for only the second time in a month we can write the following; did little, never left the hotel all day.

we slept for a long time, catching up on clearly long overdue hours. before we officially checked in, we checked the rooftop view. wow! a sea of blue rooftops in one direction, with the city's famous clock tower a nearby landmark, poking up like a marooned lighthouse; next to it as we looked, but in the distance, the 20th century extravagance of the Umaid Bhawan Palace, now predominantly a high end hotel but also the Maharaja's home.

turn around and look up - way up - and the Mehrangarh Fort is right there. only a hundred or so metres away. its walls are exceedingly high; they, in turn, are fashioned to the edge of a sheer rocky outcrop, making the whole edifice appear to have been dropped in from one of the more warlike inhabitants of Middle Earth. it towers above you, a huge solid chunk of rough stone that leaves you speechless.

in daylight, we discovered that we can see the Fort from our renegotiated price AC room. breakfast was excellent and cheap, with good service - hurray! we spent the day emailing and finally beginning to upload some of the photographs you see on this blog, as well as the requisite sleeping session in the afternoon, of course. we planned out our time in Jodhpur and discovered that our progress around Rajasthan this far has been quicker than anticipated, even though we have pretty much taken our time. this means that we don't have enough anti-malarials with us for the rest of the trip, so we looked at possible sources for that as well as option for travel in late May, by the time we'd done all of that it was already time for a great dinner that, with breakfast, was some of our largest intake of food for weeks. the hotel is quiet but peopled with some nice fellow travellers with whom to chat and swap stories.

not bad for a rooftop view - shame about the two idiots in the foreground.

surprised at how pleasant it had been not to do much all day, we went to bed in our rather large room and prepared to get back into the swing of things tomorrow. it always helps to have a hotel you like, and the staff here not only come well recommended by people we have met but also demonstrate why they were recommended in the first place. tomorrow, we unlock the secrets of the citadel above us, but tonight we feel recharged and ready to take it on sooner - provided all of this food we've eaten can settle down first!