- from Bikaner to Jaisalmer
- our new sandstone home
little sleep, an early start and a painfully slow check-out all combined to frustrate as we finally departed the Marudha Heritage around 6am. we give them top marks for location and laundry, but not for much else. our rickshaw to Bikaner's other station, Lalgarh, was through fairly deserted streets and across more of the city's rough, terribly potholed roads. the driver tried to double charge us at the end but we weren't having it, one of the few such incidents in this remarkably hassle-free city, relatively speaking.
at first sight, Lalgarh looked like it might be more fun than Jaipur, possessing no signs, announcements or clocks. we'd bought our tickets previously at the dead heat of the main station and had never been here before. however, Lalgarh did have platform numbers and the pleasant sight of an arriving train with alternating Hindi and Roman script on the side bearing the legend 'Bikaner - Jaisalmer.' our destination lay among the scrubby sands of the Thar Desert, about 150 safe kilometres from the Pakistan border and home of the famous Yellow City and Fort.
it was a very different journey leaving Bikaner than arriving. the train started fairly empty and never really filled up - we had no-one in our sleeper 'compartment' for the whole journey - and we never even had our tickets checked. a lance corporal in the Indian army, named Parshotan Lal, sat across the corridor from us. although he spoke no English, with a few basic language pages from our guides, we managed to have at least passable conversations with him. well turned out, uniformed and handsome with a neat moustache, he was outgoing and generous, giving us some of his train-bought snacks (nuts with chopped onions and lime juice, surprisingly refreshing) and pretty much all of the dough-style cakes his family has made for him for the journey, not taking no for an answer. he got off near the end of our journey at a station that must have been close to a military base for all of its trucks and soldiers on a special livered train. with him gone, we were left with only ourselves and the view.
the barren landscape of the edges of the Thar Desert intruded almost as soon as we left Bikaner and never went away. we passed some small towns on the way to Jaisalmer, including one delightfully called Bap, but none of the size of those coming up from Jaipur. more common were isolated groups of small huts, micro-communities scrabbling a living out here in the heat and the dust.
they were interspersed with scattered flocks of goats followed at a distance by their herder, small and inconclusive with the vastness all around, as well as occasional antelope and wild camel. although there were none of the stereotypical rolling dunes along this route, it was clearly desert, sand a common feature across the various landscapes we witnessed, ranging from trees and scrub to patchy grasses and tumbleweeds, or barren, wasted, dusty areas spotted with minimal vegetation. every now and then you could see the path of a dry river bed imprinted in the dust, merely a memory of water. 
the thrilling landscape of the Thar Desert
at one station, large crowds waited on its platform-less track, grouped either side of the rails in anticipation. while we were stationary, a train going in the opposite direction pulled in and there was a great deal of action, movement and colour.
in only a couple of minutes it had moved on again, leaving only the tracks themselves, now deserted.
passing time on board
after a long, hot and desiccating 7 hour journey, we found ourselves in Jaisalmer over 20 minutes early. as expected, we had to fend off rickshaw drivers on commission touting for hotels for most of that time before someone from the Shahi Palace arrived. we sped along in an approved rickshaw, the unmissable Jaisalmer Fort rising up to 100 metres above the surrounding town, the only remaining fully inhabited such structure in Rajasthan.
your first sight on disembarking in Jaisalmer
like the Fort itself, all of the buildings in Jaisalmer are made from yellow Jurassic sandstone, so that the town sometimes seems to grow straight out of the desert. located a stone's throw from the Fort's Western walls, our yellow sandstone block-built new hotel had fantastic views of the Fort from its rooftop. after some moving about with rooms due to a broken AC unit (it was 35C in a cooled room when we arrived), our new room even had a perfectly comfortable sandstone bed! it had been an energy sapping, buttock numbing journey from one desert location to another and we weren't too interested in much else other than checking in and falling over. we sketched our plans for the next few days and had a reasonable but slow meal on the roof as night fell, the hotel's sandstone blocks acting like radiators as they threw out retained heat many hours into darkness. the highly evocative skyline in one direction was the crumbling ramparts of Jaisalmer Fort, dotted with lights as its inhabitants busied themselves with their evening.
as the sky went from grey blue to a darker, midnight colour, their combined silhouette looked like a painted backdrop on a film set. nearby, a wedding party was playing brash modern Indian music. South and East, the outermost districts of the town spread out their yellow sandstone walls before merging with the desert in the middle distance. we spoke to some of the friendly staff as the stars came out in a much darker sky than we had yet seen. then it was time to take one more look at the Fort before bed, excited at our planned exploration of its famous interior tomorrow.
tunzaluv
edd & philippa
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