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Showing posts from January 25, 2010

Singing the happy Jodhpur blues

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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 eve