Jaisalmer - Sore bums, no sleep, and goats on a bus

Sitting outside the travel agent at 8pm we laughed and breathed a sigh of relief as a parked, beat up old bus that we had thought was ours pulled away....only to be replaced by an equally decrepid tin can. Getting on the bus Joe got into his single berth and we kicked off our hiking boots, laid back and settled down to enjoy the "sleeper" bus journey. Our first mistake was booking seats at the back of the bus where there is a severe lack of suspension...we have now created a section in our journals called "Lessons Learnt" - this was lesson number 1! The 10 hour trip was plagued with issues and events -

1. The suspension meant we bounced about a foot off our beds over every pot hole (these are more common than areas of flat road in India)
2. A window that wouldn't remain shut and rattled the whole journey
3. The scary suicidal speed of the bus, overtaking around corners and up hills
4. Rest stops few and far between...at one point Trevor had to battle his way over the bodies sleeping on the floor to ask the driver to stop before Sophie wet herself. After a further 15 minutes he pulled over to the side of the road...Sophie wasn't overly impressed with the toilet facilities (or lack of)
5. After about an hour of the bus journey we looked out of our berth to see the floor strewn with people, luggage, and a baby goat! Not to mention the other goat that had been put into the luggage hold, and possibly some pigs (although lack of sleep may have led us to hallucinate at this point)
6. Topped off by the fact that when we finally did arrive in Jaisalmer, the bus driver reversed into a bus behind and smashed the whole windscreen, not that anyone seemed remotely bothered by this
7. Getting off the bus we were immediately harrassed by forceful touts until Joe shouted at them to "shut up and move the **** away"

In Jaisamer we stayed at the Hotel Renuka, with a very helpul owner 'Sonny', who tried to advise us on how to use the over-complicated Indian Railway booking system, only for us to proceed to book a bus (but with seats at the front this time)!! Jaisalmer is known as the 'Golden City' due to the abundance of sandstone, crowned by an impressive fort and located in the Thar Desert, about 100km from the Pakistan Border (you could tell as there were Indian Jet Fighters on patrol all the time). The Fort was a maze of small alleyways, which looked like a scene from Aladdin, and visiting at night we enjoyed a cup of masala tea and ice-cream on a rooftop restaurant to get a better view.

We included Jaisalmer in our trip so that we could take part in the romantic vision of 'a camel ride through the rolling sand dunes of the desert' - Lawrence of Arabia style. The reality however was far from this! The two day trip consisted of mainly painful bums and legs from the camel riding, extreme heat of the sun, an annoying Kiwi couple in our group, arid land rather than rolling dunes, going to the toilet in the desert, and an irritating song that one of the porters kept singing on repeat. The trip however did visit some rolling dunes for sunset, which we got to enjoy with a cold beer in our hand (magically delivered by a random man in the desert), a great night sky with an impressive milky-way and shooting stars , and there was also some good food cooked by the guide'Del-boy' (even if we did have to eat dinner in pitch black due to insects being attracted by any light source...big insects!!) Safe to say we probably won't be riding camels again, particularly Joe who had to get off his camel and walk in the end due to the sheer pain he was in! We had a surprise visit during the trip as someone rode up to us at lunch on the first day...Julie, who we had parted ways with in Pushkar had seen our names on the trip list and decided to come and join us J On the way back from the trip we visited the 'Kuldhara Abandoned Village' which fulfilled its name in 1825 when all the members of the village and 84 nearby ones fled one night, as they weren't happy about the village chief's daughter having to marry the minister in the ruling kingdom. No-one knows where they all went and how they got away, but it is believed that the villagers cast a curse over the village as they left and no-one has ever re-inhabited it, meaning it is really well preserved and a bit of a ghost town!

On our return to the main city we decided to get the soles of our flip-flops repaired by a cobbler in the street...Trevor was pretty pleased with his,as Sophie left with new heavy platformed flip-flops!!

That evening we left to board what would hopefully be a better bus journeyto Agra...famous for the Taj Mahal, and not a lot else!