Another day, another local bus ride...but this one was only 3 hours. Yesterday we reached Bikaner, a much larger town than Mandawa. We were given a tour of the Fort in Bikaner, which is where the Raj of Bikaner used to live. The building was really impressive and had so many ornately decorated rooms, 3 tonne doors and solid silver chairs!

Yesterday evening we drove in Jeeps (very very scary experience: the driver spent most of the time on the wrong side of the road, and overtook loads even when there were no gaps. when we panicked, he found it funny and did it more!) to a farm near our hotel. We sat around a campfire, had drinks and ate pakoras while watching some Indian gypsy dancing- THEN they dressed us in saris which was AWESOME: jesses was peach coloured and mine was purple and they were SO COOL. we did some dancing with the gypsy woman: she was a really good dancer and did this spinning thing which we couldn't do at all.

This morning, we have visited the Karni Mata Rat Temple, where Hindus worship the Goddess Karni. It is believed that when people die in the village, they are reincarnated as rats: there were loads of rats crawling around and people were feeding them sweets and milk. It wasn't as bad as we thought- the rats were quite cute (jess wasn't too keen on them though, or low flying pigeons which also hang around the temple!)

tomorrow there will be no blog because we'll be on a camel safari: YAY!

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