If you’re fond of sand dunes and salty air

The train from Jaipur to Jodhpur takes nearly six hours, but it’s never a drag. It’s partly because even on daytime trains, you can pull the top couchette down and have a proper kip (why do British trains never have that option?).

But it’s also because of the pleasure to be had looking out of the window, the arable fields in eastern Rajasthan evolving slowly into rocky desert. Somewhere in the middle lies one of the strangest sights I’ve ever seen from a train: a bright pink damp plain stretching for miles and miles, with weird swirls of silver and grey in the foreground. Nothing on Google images quite does it justice, so I’m relaxing my long-held text-only rule and letting you see the pic I snapped, through the window of a moving train on my mobile phone.

It’s called the Sambhar Salt Lake, and the Army medical officer opposite me on the train, heading back to his Rajasthani village on leave from his posting in Lucknow, proudly tells me it’s the biggest salt lake in India. I’m sure he’s right: mostly, I’m just pleased I couldn’t get a direct plane ticket to Jodhpur and had to go the long way round.


Broom with a view

Jodhpur is, as well-documented by thousands of hippies and polo-trouser fans, a stunning little place: the Mehrangarh Fort looks down from its acropolis onto the Blue City below, and the Umaid Bhawan Palace points out smugly where you could be staying if only you had four times the budget.

About forty minutes’ drive away, offering rare shade from the forty degree sun, lies a new addition to the litany of weird museums I’ve visited: Arna Jharna is devoted to the humble broom, and the fine people that have made them for centuries in this part of the world. It’s perched on the very edge of a hilly outcrop: look west and the desert, dotted with well hard trees but otherwise flat as a chapathi, goes on and on before gradually turning into the sky.







Pink City indeed

Back into Jaipur en route home, and time to visit the bad-boy auto drivers I met three days earlier. Nice chaps, but I don’t get the feeling they’re going to be faithful to their wives, should any woman ever be so foolhardy.

One of them (I’ll call him Rohit, not his real name) asks to borrow my phone to check email on the web browser, then promptly uses it to look at gay porn. Well, you have to admire his enormous, er, chutzpah.

Later, we bump into a German backpacker guy and have chai by the side of the road. Turns out the German pleasured old Rohit in the autorickshaw last night. And over there’s the frizzy Canadian that Rohit cruelly rejected the day before. They call Jaipur the Pink City, but I didn't think this was quite what they meant.