Ranakpur: Let's just call it the "Wow Temple".

What do you do when India's 2nd largest Jain temple stands between you and your next scheduled stop? Easy, you hire a car and break up your drive with the coolest rest stop ever. The massive temple located in Ranakpur, midway between Jodhpur and Udaipur, is built entirely of marble and boasts 1444 carved columns with no two alike (well, maybe a couple are alike but no two are identical).

We were there when the doors opened to visitors and stayed for what felt like minutes, but was probably closer to hours. I walked around completely awestruck, marvelling at the workmanship and artistry of each column, trying in vain to absorb each and every detail.

As with the temples at Khajuraho, it was incomprehensible to me that prior to my research on India, I was not familiar with this site. And it is wonder-of-the-world level amazing! Were the temple anywhere else, it would be a major star attraction, but my theory is that India possesses such an embarrassment of riches when it comes to architectural beauty that some things are unjustly left by the wayside. Continue reading»»

Singing the happy Jodhpur blues

A sleeper train with bunks stacked three high brought us to our eighth stop, Jodhpur. Known as the blue city, not for its love of emotion-filled guitar-heavy music or the residents' inordinate sadness, but for the indigo blue tint used to paint many of its buildings, it is one of those places where you just know you can not take a bad photograph. The tiny cow-clogged lanes look so artfully distressed that you could swear that a team of decorators had recently come through with the latest shabby chic manual in hand.

Our hotel lay smack in the middle of all that blueness at the foot of the Mehrangarh Fort, so even our pre-dawn arrival was not enough to keep me still for more than an hour or two. As soon as the sun peaked over the horizon, Laura and I were making our steep ascent up the hill, trying to keep an accurate count of how many ancient gates we had passed through, lest we bypass the entrance to the fort itself. Apparently, we were approaching from the back side, leading everyone to caution us about not missing a turn after the fourth (or was it fifth?) gate. Continue reading»»