We’re sitting on the shaded rooftop terrace of the beautiful haveli hotel ‘Seventh Heaven’ in Pushkar (despite phoning a week ahead we couldn’t get a room) listening to Janis Joplin blaring out of the speakers. It doesn’t get much more relaxing. We’re hanging around before jumping on a local bus to Ajmer and our 2am train departure to Delhi and back to hectic Indian life.
After the eventful 7 1/2 hour bus journey with the 2 flat tyres we made it safely to our guest house in Udaipur, a beautiful small city in southern Rajasthan. These few days were a bit of a holiday from the holiday as the fast pace we’d been setting around Rajasthan so far meant that we just felt like not doing much for a while, and this seemed like the perfect place to not do much at all! We had a room on the quiet side of town, with windows along 2 of the walls (joy!) overlooking Lake Pichola and the City Palace, which looked beautiful at sunset.
The bus journey from Jodphur to Jaisalmer (the ‘golden city’) was our first really long distance bus journey and it was actually pretty good! The journey was supposed to last 6.5 hours but the driver got there in 5! It’s pretty lucky we couldn’t see out the front of the bus because the driver must have been picking up some crazy speed to be so early! Because we were early the pick up from the hotel that we’d arranged wasn’t there, but some other bloke convinced us he was from our guest house and drove us there, the whole time telling us how bad our guest house was and that (surprise, surprise) he had a place that was much cheaper and better. Thankfully he did actually take us there, but waited outside to make sure we were happy with the room before he left.
