Cheryl and Mike’s Adventure

We’re blogging live from Jaisalmer today, and first off we want to apologize for the long stretch since the last post. When we last wrote, we were leaving Jaipur, heading to Jodhpur. We had planned on doing a post there, and simply didn’t get around to it, and since we’ve been here in Jaisalmer we really haven’t been on the internet very much due to that fact that the whole town has dial-up, and absolutely ANCIENT computers (I think I saw the model from my freshman year in college), so it’s been pretty painful being online. Hard to believe, but we have only 6days left on our trip (we head back to the States next Tues. evening, the 18th). We’re starting to put our last week into shape, tonight we catch a train at 4pm, and have a LONG haul through the night, back to Delhi, which gets in about 10:30AM. That will be, more or less, our base camp for until we fly out of there next week. We are planning on taking a quick trip for 2 days from Delhi, via train, to the town of Amritsar, which is right along the India/Pakistan border. There’s evidently some interesting ceremony up there, in which people from both countries stand along the border have some sort of dance-off or something. (I don’t even have a joke here). The plan is to be there for two nights, then back down to Delhi by the 17th. Anyway, it’s getting down to the end, but it’s safe to say we both feel ready to head back home for the holidays. It’s been quite a trip, both exhilarating and exhausting (heavy emphasis on India for the exhausting part), and we’re looking forward to heading back, catching our breath and sharing the trip with everyone (*Quick note, we’re hoping to sit down and improve our blog a bit while we’re home, time permitting…hopefully we can keep it going, to a degree, while we’re over in New Zealand. We’re hoping for some increased photo/video capability. This was our first stab at this, so it’s been pretty limited but once we figure out what the heck we’re doing we’re hoping to do some cool stuff).

The highlight of the last week or so was probably yesterdays Camel Trekking trip. We arrived in Jaisalmer 3 days ago. It’s a small town/city in the western edge of India, waaaay out in the desert. The first day was spend walking around the city, doing some shopping and checking out a large fort complex/area which people still live in. There were several Temples inside which are hundreds of years old that we checked out and were pretty interesting. Yesterday was the day of the vaunted Camel Trek in the Thar Desert(one of the activities that was most anticipated by Cheryl on the whole trip). Originally envisioned as an overnight safari into the desert, it was raining (and rather cold/overcast) yesterday morning (we were scheduled to leave at 8AM), so we decided to postpone our departure and catch the 1:30 shuttle out to the desert. At this point, camping out was in question, due to the weather and the fact that it was pretty overcast cloudy, and we really wouldn’t be able to see any of the stars or anything (you sleep out on a sleeping mat w/blankets, no tent or anything). By the afternoon, we decided to bag the overnight and just do a sunset 2 1/2 trek. In the end, it was perfect. The weather broke, and we rode through the sand dunes in the sunset, which was pretty spectacular. The camels were pretty entertaining, actually much bigger than we had thought (you’re pretty high up there on top of them), fairly even tempered (we had heard rumors of them being a bit ornery), and not nearly as, um, gastric as we had thought, either. Very entertaining, slightly different than riding a horse for sure…we got some good video and pics of the whole event.

Prior to here, we were in Jodhpur, which was a slightly larger city/town about 6 hours away (via train), and enjoyable but not necessarily our favorite place. The highlight was probably (another) fort which we visited, which was rather historic and interesting however I don’t have the guidebook or any material in front of me right now, so I can’t remember any of the details at this moment (sorry blogging audience…don’t worry, you’ll be inundated with Temples/Forts/Towns when we’re explaining it all to you in person). Plus, when you travel this much, towns that were only like, 3 days ago feel like 2 weeks ago.

That’s it for now, we’re catching the train this afternoon, and we’ll give an update from Delhi (we’re hoping for more Pizza Huts!). It will be interesting to see how the city seems to us after all this time in India, vs. the overwhelming feeling when we first stepped off the plane oh so long ago. Hope all is well with everyone, we can’t wait to see/talk to everybody. Send us your thoughts if you get a chance…

Cheryl & Mike

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 12th, 2007 at 3:31 am and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.