After a quick stop at the Chhatri we went to what is widely recognised as the crown jewel of Jaisalmer: the Jaisalmer Fort. Sitting atop Meru hill, the fort draws the eyes from anywhere within the city, especially at night, when it is lit up with floodlights, and effuses a golden glow that shines like a beacon against the dark sky. Unlike most historical locations we’ve seen on this trip, though, the fort is still inhabited. It also has a monumental population of pigeons fluttering in and around it, so all you folk suffering from ornithophobia, you have been warned. Everything from clothiers’ to barbers’ and restaurants can be found inside the fortifications of the fort too, almost like a city within the city. The fort was built in AD 1156, and the façade of its exterior has been maintained to this day. Walking through its gates is like travelling back in time, with the thick, looming fortifications inducing a sense of safety, shelter, and comfort. With night setting in, we headed back to our hotel for some rest. After all, we had a long drive ahead of us the following day.
Crack of dawn, and we were off, the roads in Rajasthan being consistent in the sense that they were excellent as ever, and the animals seemed to enjoy them just as much as the travellers because they just wouldn’t stop encroaching! We were wise to this possibility, though, and a good thing too, because at one point we had to suddenly swerve to avoid a nilgai that had run on to the road out of nowhere. The nilgai, if it was an intelligent being, would have definitely sent Hyundai a ‘thank you’ note for equipping the Santa Fe with ABS and traction control, for were it not for the safety features, that particular jaywalking (jaytrotting?) mammal would have been history. If you’ve never seen a nilgai, it looks like a cloning experiment gone bad. It has the head of an animal hailing from the antelope family, and a body of a cow! In a word, freak.
Our skirmish with the deer-cow hybrid was just a precursor to a larger malaise, because soon enough we ran into (figuratively, no animals were harmed in the making of this travelogue) another breed of highway encroachers. This time, they weren’t even restricted to the four-legged staying on the ground kind, because there were these annoying birds flying low and across the road for seemingly no reason. I don’t know if they had a false sense of bravado or a large-scale death wish or, maybe, they were just hankering for the attention that endangered species get. Whatever the reason, they seemed to enjoy diving in towards the fast-moving Santa Fe and then attempting to dart out of the way. Annoying birds apart, though, the road was glorious. Our planned route for the day would take us to Jaipur with stops en route at Jodhpur and Pushkar. After a few hours of dodging the birds, signboards at the roadside indicated that we had almost reached Jodhpur.
