Wired for Sound

Sunday 16 November 2008
Pushkar – Jodhpur

So I grab a quick breakfast and we head back on to the road. The countryside here is dead flat, with a dark red sandstone earth and single trees evenly spread across it like a spacious orchard. There's the occasional red sandstone wall dividing out arable farmland, though what the animals feed on I've no idea. The only animals I ever saw were, ironically, in the road. Goats, cows and plenty of dogs are the order of the day here. The goats are funny, they make silly noises and are very stupid.

With the countryside so consistently similar I soon fall asleep and Raj wakes me up when we arrive at the outskirts of Jodhpur. With a town named after a silly trouser, what could we expect? Well no one wearing jodhpurs that's for sure. The local Maharajahs invented them in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries and the spread over the world when they visited Europe.

We grab lunch and my nose is streaming. Afterwards we buy some napkins and head up to the Red Fort, sitting on top of a sandstone outcrop in the centre of the plain, it has been faithfully turned into a museum by the still-existing Maharajah – he's even installed a lift to make things easier.

There's a good audio tour (my first ever!) in a fantastic Indian-English accent which I listen to. I basically sneeze my way round enjoying it as much as I can. And it is enjoyable. It's the best maintained place I've been to, and the audio tour makes it mean something without having to rely on extortionate “official government” guides.

But it's really the views that steal the show. Looking out from the fort you get an amazing view of the city. Firstly you can see the wider town walls snake over the surrounding cliffs and sandstone outcrops, and beyond that is the fragmented square patches of the rest of the town, with a large number of walls painted blue, from the indigo mixed in with the whitewash to deter insects. Jodhpur is known at the “Blue city” and not Pushkar, as Pushkar isn't that big and therefore not a city as such.

After we return to the hotel I have some time to myself, but the fan and light in my room have stopped working, so I arrange for the hotel people to fix them. I read my book while I wait for them to do that. After that I meet with Raj to go into town.

We go to the main market area near the clock tower and I walk round, but it's basically full of the same market trash that I've seen in every town so far. I do manage to take a picture of a heavily-adorned tuk-tuk, something that I've wanted to do for a while. I'm not sure why, maybe it's a Hindu thing, but minimalism is as foreign an idea as you can get in this country. Everything, from the tuk-tuks, to the lorries, to the camels, and to pretty much any surface that can receive a paintbrush or hang a pompom, is adorned in some way. It's a profusion of excess design, without care or grand scheme, that overwhelms the senses and matches the chaos and excess of the people and their attitude.

Japanese minimalism this ain't.

After that Raj takes me to his recommended spice shop and I buy a couple of things. It's actually something I want to buy after all. Though it's funny as they keep on giving me things to smell, and I don't have the best nasal sense in the first place, but add in a cold and pretty much everything smells the same. After that, given the choice, I choose to have dinner back at the hotel as the less effort is best for me given my current health.

After dinner I help Raj write a few emails to previous clients of his. It's at this point that I realise how bad his English is. That's not to say it's bad – it's pretty good all things considered – but I do have a hard time understanding him most of the time. “Understand, not?” is his most common question to me. Usually it's not. But when he reads back the words that I've written, he misinterprets or mispronounces most of them. It's quite a revelation.

After I surf the net myself for a bit and once again it's a welcome relief to head to bed.