Despite being water bombed (and Alexandra egged) last night on the way to a restaurant for dinner, we decided to brave the streets of Delhi this afternoon for the Holi celebrations. We intentionally wore nice white tops and, as we thought, like a red rag to a bull the happy locals just couldn’t resist getting us involved. We had water poured over us from the top of buildings, water bombs thrown at us from every angle and people jumping out from behind corners to squirt blue dye at us. Then there was the powdered paint which was lovingly smothered all over our faces and heads by well wishers, and unfortunately for Alexandra, accompanied by a good old grope from some of the more drunk of them.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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After treating ourselves to a night in a very nice hotel in New Delhi to allow Alexandra to recover from her twisted ankle we filled up on the huge posh buffet breakfast (knowing that we wouldn’t have the chance to eat a full fried breakfast, followed by cereal, followed by pastries, followed by fruit, followed by cheese and crackers, followed by coffee for some time), jumped in a taxi to the airport and caught our flight to Jodhpur, the ‘blue city’.

Unfortunately on our first night we were unable to get into our guest house of choice in the old town and we were stuck in one of the new areas of the city which meant loud traffic noise and lots of smog. Fortunately the ‘rooftop restaurant’ is about as common as a dodgy bathroom in guest houses across Rajasthan. So we spent the evening relaxing and enjoying the view while having dinner on the roof.

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