Bikaner is a dirty, quite industrial town in the middle of the desert. An odd choice to visit you might think, however it was from here we were able to do a camel safari into the desert. We stayed in a guesthouse run by a guy called Vino (Spanish for wine, or so his website strangely declares) which we purposely chose as he was recommended to do camel safari-ing with. I'll get to that in a bit because the guesthouse was probably the oddest place we've stayed at so far. We were basically living in this family’s house, eating meals in their lounge and we generally felt like we were stepping on their toes a lot of the time. Not to mention the fact that we discovered an ants nest in our bathroom on the first day – these had a nasty nip on them as well, which Hannah discovered at about 3am as they chose the middle of the night to start vacating the bathroom and march into our bedroom or should I say into Hannah's bed! Cue a slightly deranged Hannah stomping round the room trying to squish them all with bits of toilet paper. I may have inflamed the situation by suggesting she was making a fuss about nothing. This did not go down well!
 
Like I said though, the main reason for being in Bikaner was going into the desert on a Camel! We gladly booked ourselves in for 3 days and 2 nights. We had a camel each, a tent to sleep in every night and all our food prepared for us! The height of luxury :) The first two days were spent with three French people who were nice and spoke English with varying degrees of success and the final day it was just me and Hannah. We managed to recall little or none of our GCSE French to help things along, although I'm not sure how much use a description of mon chambre would have been! Each day of the safari basically involved 2 hours of riding in the morning, finding a nice tree for shade at about 12, eating lunch, having a snooze and then getting back onto our camels at about 3:30 to ride to the camp site. The meal times were probably the most entertaining as it was interesting to watch the guide and his helpers rustle up a different vegetable curry every time, along with fresh chapatis all cooked over an open fire. Hannah even managed to help out on the last day, much to her enjoyment. We also discovered that they use sand mixed with a small amount of water to do the washing up, must have worked though as we weren't ill – for once! In the evening after dinner the guides used to go a bit mental and start singing and dancing to music from their mobile phones which was entertaining for an hour, think they were sipping the local moonshine on the sly. By about 9pm though we were usually tired and went and watched the stars by dragging our beds out of our tent and getting under our duvets. They are spectacular in the desert and I think Hannah enjoyed this the most. We even managed to see a shooting star! :)

As our train wasn't until the early hours of our last day in Bikaner we had the whole day to do something. As is the case a lot of time on this trip the first port of call was food! So out comes the Lonely Planet to find somewhere. After some discussion we agreed on a place called Pause Café - mainly because it had WiFi. So we knew its vague location was near the fort and got a tuk tuk there hoping that we'd be able to find it with the help of the Lonely Planet map. After about half an hour of searching we started asking locals. Now in these situations if you ask one person and they don't know where something is they'll ask someone else, who asks someone else. Once this begins to happen, people who were simply passing by begin to form a crowd round puzzling over what on earth we could be asking for. It can get a bit much at times. So eventually we get pointed down the road and search for another 15 minutes. Next we ask a tuk tuk driver who offers to take us where we want free of charge. Great we think. Until it turns out he doesn't really understand English and takes us back to the fort, WHERE WE STARTED. So we helpfully point out his mistake and he takes us to the Post Office! Aghhhhhhh. So we begin searching and asking again still with no luck, Hannah even went into a dentists in the hope that he spoke better English. After well over an hour of searching we gave up and decided to eat at a place called the Garden Café. Which, as it turns out, used to be the Pause Cafe!!! After food we decided to go to the temple of rats, yes its exactly what you think. A Hindu temple containing lots of rats, fed by worshippers. It smelt really bad and was made worse by the fact that you had to go in barefoot meaning you had rats crawling on you if you weren't careful - i may have accidentally launched a couple when they did this. Before we got there however there was a much more exciting incident as two massive bulls started fighting in the middle of the main road. A tremendously highly populated area with lots of traffic, people and little stalls either side of the road. Two fighting bulls is not what you need in this scenario. These boys were proper going at it, heads locked pushing as hard as they could. People were rushing out the way, moving their motorbikes or little food carts and we were quickly ushered inside somewhere safe. I think its the only thing I've seen which has actually stopped traffic in India. They could have easily killed someone had they been in the wrong place. A few brave lads whacked them with sticks or chucked water on them to try and break up the fight but it made little difference until eventually one chickened out and trotted off.