India Blues in the Blue City of Jodhpur, India.

Jaipur may not have been my idea of a pink city, but the blue city of Jodhpur, India, where many of the buildings and houses are painted blue, was pretty blue, if only from a distance.

 

The Blue City of Jodhpur, India

The train ride to Jodhpur was an exhausting five hours. It was better than the last one we took, a clown car of a train that at every stop piled on more people than you could ever think would fit, where Jaime and I couldn’t even see each other across the aisle, where the doors wouldn’t close and people were hanging on to the window bars outside.

It was, at least, better than that.

We arrived in Jodhpur late, though, and while the guesthouse knew we were coming they didn’t have the space, so they put us in a sister room next door. The toilet didn’t work and the comforters were too heavy but sometimes you just take what you can get. We ate dinner and met the owner, who also was the director of the volunteer program we were coming to take part in, Sambhali Trust.

But I was tired, and just itching to go to bed.

The next morning Jaime and I took a tuktuk into the main area of the blue city Jodhpur. We explored some of the market. We visited Mehrangarh, a giant fort that loomed over the entire town.

Can I tell you something? I listed to the entire audio guide that accompanied our tour around that fort and I don’t think I can tell you a single thing that it said. I remember a story about someone getting a picture of somebody’s ankle. And that’s about it.

I sometimes feel like I’m a terrible traveler.

But, in truth, Jaime and I were already hitting a wall in India. We had the India blues.

We were exhausted. Exhausted from moving around so much. Exhausted from dealing with the in-your-face craziness that is India. I was particularly anxious because I wasn’t really looking forward to our upcoming volunteer assignment. And, to top it all off, we figured out that to get to our next destination we would have to take a train for 24 hours, having to backtrack to Agra to get there.

I was half thinking that I should just ditch out, just buy a ticket straight on to Australia or back to Thailand, just give up on India.

The next day we decided we needed a break. Which, to me, inevitably means pizza. And that, inevitably, led to a hilarious exchange when Jaime just went up to a tuktuk driver and asked him to take us to Pizza Hut. Of course, there was no Pizza Hut in India, but we did end up at Uncle Sam’s Pizza where we ate all the pizza.

Same, same. But different. But delicious. So who cares?

And then we went to the train station and, surprisingly easily, booked our next 24-hour 2-train train ride. And then decided to just book our journey on from there to make things easier. To make things more settled.

And then we went to a store and bought them out of the two rolls of toilet paper they had. And then we went to another store and bought four rolls from them (after a worker had to take his motorbike somewhere else to re-stock). Which was, quite frankly, hilarious. But sometimes you just need to make sure you are prepared…

And after all of that we felt a little better.

It’s amazing how simple things can put you in a better mood: easy transactions, having a plan, being prepared, laughing over the hilarity of finding pizza or buying a store out of toilet paper.