India: Oct 21: Slow-Speed Wandering Through Jodhpur

Because the overnight train we were to take from Jodhpur back to Delhi was to leave in the early evening, and because we didn't have any other major sites we wanted to see Jodhpur, we spent the day lackadaisically browsing the city and eating. During the day, I took a handful of pictures. It was even hotter than usual and we spent as much time as possible sitting indoors or in the shade.

For lunch, we had a traditional thali (large Indian meal made from many small dishes) at the road-side restaurant attached to a cheap hotel (Hotel Priya). It was a fine but not notable meal. Happily, it was reasonably-sized--we didn't have to overeat. We followed up lunch with a trip to a Cafe Coffee Day.

Once downtown, at the clock tower, we headed to a bookstore (Krishna Book Depot) with a surprisingly good selection of English books. I bought one for the plane ride home. We never would have found this shop without a reference in our guide book. It was one of very few bookstores we saw outside Delhi, and certainly the only one that carried English books. Then, in the same vicinity, we went to an internet cafe, an art shop selling paintings and sketches, a juice stand, and a road-side samosa stand. The last looked fresh enough that this was one of the few times I disregarded the World Health Organization's advice to avoid eating street food. The samosa was good.

By this time, it was mid-afternoon. We walked to our hotel, relaxed for a bit, then rickshawed with our bags to a restaurant across the street from the train station. We had a decent, early dinner at Midtown Vegetarian Restaurant, then boarded our overnight train to Delhi.

This train trip was a bit more pleasant than other ones. Because we were in an AC car, they gave us blankets, sheets, and a pillow. :) Unlike our other overnight trip, the blankets turned out to be unnecessary--our AC car was sealed well (i.e., had no drafts), so everything stayed fairly comfortable.

Before going to bed, I had more sweets from the box we were carrying around since Jaipur.

One neat observation about train travel: Even if your eyes are closed, you know when you stop by a train station because suddenly things smell. (Stations tend to smell more than the countryside, and stopping allows the smell time to intensify.)