Days 20-21: Jaisalmer

“And the question is, was I more alive then than I am now?
I happily have to disagree
I laugh more often now
I cry more often now
I am more me...”
-Peter Bjorn and John, “Objects of My Affection”

Locations: Jaisalmer (Rajasthan)

Photos: http://princeton.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2050686&l=dcc87&id=1101094

Temperature: 98

Morale: 4

Spinning: Peter Bjorn and John - Writer's Block, Sufjan Stevens - Illinois, TV on the Radio - Return to Cooke Mountain

Reading: Lonely Planet, Are You Experienced? by William Sutcliffe, Freakonomics by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner

Talking: Hardly at all to the touts—silence was my strategy of choice in Jaisalmer; to some Indian soldiers and a middle class Indian family on the train to Jaipur.

What's next (I think): Jaipur (Rajasthan)

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I really like these lines, which are taken from a song by a Swedish band called Peter Bjorn and John, and while listening to them I was thinking about how my last few emails have sounded somewhat dire. But you should know that I was, after all, expecting all the hassles, lies, and everything else that I've gotten here—and in the end, that's what backpacking in the developing world is all about. It's not supposed to be easy. But despite all the frustrations and annoyances, my underlying feeling is that I still love it, and I wouldn't trade my time here for anything. Just wasn't sure if that part was coming through in all these emails.

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My overnight train arrived in Jaisalmer at 6:30am, which was an hour late. As I’m quickly realizing, even trains that leave on time do not arrive on time. But why should trains be late? There's no traffic, right? Ah, but as one person pointed out to me today, there are cows. That could actually be quite a problem, especially at night.

On the platform in Jodhpur, I had spoken with a guy who was trying to enlist people to stay at his hotel in Jaisalmer, and, seeing as I had no idea where I was going to stay, I actually listened to him. He said he had really low prices and a great place (two things that never, ever exist in unison, and I wasn't about to believe that this was the lone exception), but more importantly, that he would have someone pick me up at the train station and take me to the hotel, and if I didn't like the place I could just walk to another guest house but wouldn't have to pay anything for the ride from the train station. I like free options, so I said ok.

Sure enough, the guy from the hotel found me—just walked up to me and said, “You are Robert Huber?” I guess there weren't many other single white guys getting off the train that morning. We drove from the train station to the old city in his jeep. At this point it was almost 7:00, and I knew that the Roddick/Federer match had to be starting soon, so when I got to the hotel I told the owner that the only way I was staying was if they had a room with a satellite TV that had the US Open. He said sure, sure, no problem (and just then a big rat ran by his foot—nice), and took me to a room with a TV. I turned the TV on, and all I saw was fuzz.

“No, no, this isn't going to work, this TV isn't working.”

“Oh, cable is out in whole city, will be back on in a few minutes probably.”

Hmm, what to do. Believing anything that anyone who wanted my money said had not been a good plan at any point during my trip so far, so I was tempted to leave, but then again the power does go out here a lot, so it was credible that the cable could go out too. Plus, this hotel was going to let me check in at 7am without paying anything extra, which might not be true for other hotels in town. I decided to wait a few minutes.

By 7:30 the TV still was not working, and I was getting impatient. “Ok, I think I might go see if I can find a TV somewhere else,” I told the owner. “Just wait until 8am, that's when the cable office opens and I can call them to see what's wrong,” he said.

Wait, you need to call the cable office to see what's wrong? I thought you already knew that it was a city-wide outage? Liar. I left immediately.

Only one place in the Lonely was listed as having satellite TV, so I went there. Incidentally, the place also had a swimming pool, which was a nice bonus.

The place was called Hotel Golden City (Jaisalmer is known as the Golden City because everything is made of golden-brown sandstone), and when I got there I asked for a room with a TV, the owner and I turned the TV on, and the first image that popped up was Venus Williams hitting a serve. Nice!

The room cost Rs 300, which was on the expensive side of what I'd been paying, but in addition to the TV the room opened up onto the pool deck, so I could walk out my door and right into the pool. In fact, I watched most of the Roddick/Federer match from the pool—just turned the TV to face out the door. It was great. Anyhow, I took the room.

I took a shower, caught the end of the Venus match, and then went for a swim while Roddick and Federer warmed up. The pool felt amazing—I think this was the first time that my entire body had been cool since Dharamsala.

I watched from the pool as Roddick played good tennis and still get spanked. There's no point in watching men's tennis anymore—Federer is just too good. Anyhow, I actually missed the end of the first set and the first set tiebreak because the cable legitimately went out city-wide. Who knows, maybe it had been out city-wide before, while I was at the other hotel, and had come on just as I was walking to Hotel Golden City. Unlikely. But the cable came back on in 45 minutes or so, and in the intervening time I chatted with an Israeli couple who had come down for a swim.

As you can probably tell from my previous emails, I have not been overly excited about the vast majority of Israeli travelers whom I have met in India. For the most part, I find them to be aggravatingly cheap (though Nimmy gave me a good explanation for this, which involves most of the kids having just finished the military and having little money and having to make what little they do have last for an entire year of traveling—if that's it, fair enough), totally self-righteous (they think they are experts on India, for sure, but also on pretty much every other country you mention, even if you've been there and they haven't), and so backpacker-clichéd that it makes me wince (talking about “finding yourself” and all this other nonsense—please, I have no problem with coming to India to find yourself, but isn't the whole point to keep it to yourself? I couldn't give two shits about the spiritual awakening you had after meeting the Dalai Lama).

The interesting thing is, in general I find I get along quite well with Israelis. I mean, I loved Israel and everyone I met there (Adam and I even said we thought living in Tel Aviv one day would be paradise), and I've always clicked with the Israelis I've known in the states—always found them to be legitimately interesting people, which is rare, and I've also found them to be quite hard-nosed and resourceful, qualities which I obviously respect. So what was the problem with these Israelis that I kept meeting all over India?

I think it has to do with two things. One is age. These kids are mostly something like 19, having just finished the military and moving on to university next. And I don't think your average 19 year old is all that mature (although a 19 year old Israeli is likely more mature than a 19 year old American). So maybe that's one reason I've been annoyed by all the backpacker clichés and pseudo-intellectual comments—that's not really abnormal coming from a bunch of 19 year olds.

The second thing has to do with India specifically. Israeli kids don't all visit India after the IDF—some go to South America, some go to Southeast Asia, and some probably go to Europe and America, though I think that's less common. So I'm seeing a subset of Israelis—the ones who chose to come to India, and specifically northern India, which, between Rishikesh (the yoga capital of the world), Dharamsala (Dalai Lama), a multitude of ashrams (Hindu spiritual retreats), and a wealth of available drugs (mostly pot and mushrooms), is an obvious place to explore the spiritual realm. So, I think, the Israelis that I've run into are predisposed to wanting to “find themselves” spiritually. Which explains a lot.

Anyhow, talking to these Israelis in the pool was a relief, because they were not the usual Israeli-in-India type. First of all, they weren't 19, but 35, which is a good start for avoiding pseudo-intellectualism, and secondly they were the tough, perceptive, somewhat cynical kind of Israelis that I already respected from my experiences in Israel and the US. We talked a lot about traveling around India, and specifically about all the hassles and lies.

The woman made some really insightful, if a little bit racist, comments about both Indian and Arab culture. First of all, she said that traveling in India is not so much different from traveling in an Arab country—you get the same annoying touts that won't leave you alone and don't respect personal space, you get the same bunch of people who try to cheat as much money out of you as they can, and you get the same unflinching lies from just about everyone you meet who has a vested interest in getting you to believe something. As the guy chimed in, “In India, and in Arab countries like Egypt, people don't think twice about lying—if it will get the deal done, then, no problem, they just lie.” A bit harsh, but I can't say I have many data points that don't support this viewpoint.

The woman went on to say that she felt a little more prepared than most travelers to visit a place like India, because she lived amongst “those people” all the time. By which she meant Arabs, which, per the above paragraph, she saw as not all that different from Indians. She admitted that her comments were a little bit racist, but in her experience she had just never been given a good reason to trust Arabs, and so she didn't trust them. She's right, that's a little bit racist, but I must admit that Adam, Ian and I had many of the same sentiments while traveling around the Middle East. I'm not creating events out of thin air here—it's really as simple as, in Egypt I got lied to about 50 times a day, and in Israel nobody lied to me. So what am I supposed to think?

In that same vein, the couple told me that this particular hotel owner, at the Golden City, was particularly slimy. He had evicted some of their friends from the hotel (in the middle of the night!) after they chose to book a camel safari through someone else. Yikes.

I think it was right then that I decided to be a lot less nice during my last week in India. If people are going to lie to me, I'm going to lie right back. If they're going to make rude comments at me from the side of the road (I finally know how women feel when they are cat-called by construction workers), I'm going to make rude comments right back. In general I don't believe in “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,” but frankly I'm tired of turning the other cheek. I can be a fantastic liar if I want to be, and I can be pretty insulting, too. Watch out, Indians. It's time for Hammurabi's Code.

Based on what the Israelis had told me concerning the camel safari business, I decided that my first lie would be to keep my hotel completely in the dark about my safari plans. You see, hotels in Jaisalmer make some money off renting rooms, but they make far more money from booking camel safaris. Only, the Great Thar Desert is not supposed to be that exciting—there are a few dune seas, but most of the terrain is just barren scrub. Seeing as I had already seen the Sahara from both sides (as well as the Peruvian desert, which also seems better than the Thar), I decided I would pass on the camel safari. But once my hotel owner knew that I wouldn't be booking a camel safari through him, my life would most likely get a lot more difficult. So far they were treating me like a king, so I decided to lie to them until the moment I checked out.

“You book camel safari today?”

“I'm still waiting to hear from my friends in Jaipur about meeting up—so I don't know yet whether I'll have time for the five day trek or maybe just the four day one.”

His greedy eyes lit up—the four and five day safaris are by far the most profitable.

“But I should know by tomorrow, so I'll book then.”

He bought every word.

My Israeli friends headed back up to their room, but not before saying that I was most welcome to visit Israel again, and if I did visit I should look them up. I don't know why it feels good to hear that—it's not like you need resident's permission to visit a country—but it does.

I watched the rest of the Roddick spanking, swam in the pool a bit more (did I mention the pool felt glorious?), and then got dressed and went down to the train reservation office to see about getting a train to Jaipur for the following night.

To buy a train ticket in India, you have to first fill out a little reservation form, but you have to wait in the main line to get said reservation form, and then you have to get out of line to fill it out, and then get back in line and wait again before you can buy your ticket. Indian efficiency is really amazing. Oh, and by “line,” I really mean “mob,” which you will remain at the back of for all eternity unless you push and shove and jockey for position like everyone else. Folks, really, I don't mean to be a Western imperialist here, but isn’t it more efficient (and much more pleasant) if everyone just waits in an orderly line?

I got the ticket, and the train was scheduled to leave at 4pm the next day, which meant I would see Jaisalmer today, check out of my hotel the following morning, and then kill time in an internet café until my train. I'd probably have to keep my pack with me once I checked out, because I don't think my hotel will be jumping up and down to store it for me once they realize the camel safari isn't happening.

I stopped by my hotel to splash some cold water on my face, and then I walked up to Jaisalmer Fort, which is really quite remarkable. The fort was built in 1156, and is huge—it has 99 bastions (lookout towers) around its walls, and 25% of the population of Jaisalmer (so, that's 15,000 people) still lives inside it. The problem is that the fort is sinking, mostly because of water seeping into its foundation. It wasn't built to support anywhere near the number of people who now live inside it, and additionally all the tourist restaurants and guest houses make the situation much worse because they use ungodly amounts of water (and fill the sewage pipes, which are already over capacity, with even more liquids). Lonely Planet advises travelers to “make the ethical choice” and stay outside the fort, but of the ten tourists on my train from Jodhpur, I was the only one who didn't stay in the fort. I guess travelers are unwilling to consult “The Tourist Bible” on ethical matters. How ironic.

Anyway, the fort is impressive. I first visited a group of seven Jain Temples (Jainism is a religion that, like Buddhism, rejected the caste system and rituals of Hinduism, only Jainism never spread outside India as Buddhism did—for more info, click this link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jainism), which were beautiful, intricately carved structures with fascinating statues and idols inside.

I then walked to the palace complex, which, taking a cue from the Meherangarh in Jodhpur, cost Rs 250 but included an audio tour. Once again the audio tour was fantastic, and included more Rajasthani history and less information about the fort itself than the tour in Jodhpur. It seems that what is now Rajasthan was once a collection of 22 independent, princely states, all with their own ability to tax and spend. In 1947, when India became independent, the states of Rajputana, as the area was then called, elected to join India as the state of Rajasthan (which means Land of Kings).

There's a lot more, but I won't bore you. After leaving the palace I headed out of the fort toward an old haveli that stood just outside the fort walls. On the way, I stopped for lunch at an Indian restaurant with a roof terrace that overlooked the fort. The food, as always, was great, as was the view.

I haven't been describing what my walks from place to place, both within the fort and outside it, were like: in a word, they were awful. The touts here are worse than ever. But I’ve realized that there is a simple rule that can explain and even predict this behavior: the more “touristy” a place is, the worse the touts are.

That’s obvious, you say. But wait: my definition of “touristy” has nothing to do with the number of tourists in a place; instead, it's all about the percentage of the city's annual GDP that is attributable to tourism, because that is the percentage of the population that you will want to murder if you stay in the city for more than two hours.

But seriously, that's really what matters. In Jaisalmer, for instance, there are two main job providers—tourism, and a military base. There isn't any other legitimate industry here. In high season there are boatloads of tourists, but in low season there aren't, and there aren't other jobs in town that people can get during low season, so that leaves a whole bunch of touts with nothing to do. And so they choose to spend their free time annoying me.

Anyway, I struggled past the touts and made it to the haveli, which was built by five wealthy Jain brothers. The place was huge, and the carvings on the outside were incredibly detailed. Inside was less exciting, except for the spectacular view of the fort from the roof.

At this point I was exhausted, and all I wanted to do was go back to my hotel and spend the rest of the afternoon in the swimming pool.

But upon entering said swimming pool, I found a floating piece of feces. I'm not sure if it was human feces, or animal feces, or maybe baby diaper feces, but in the end I didn't really care. Wherever it came from, I would never be getting in that pool again. Having worked at a pool for three summers, I know the effort involved in “shocking” a pool with chlorine following a feces incident, and I was 99% sure that this hotel owner would not ever consider expending that sort of effort on this. So, the fun was over.

I showered off, and then I showered again, and then I headed out to find an internet cafe. I found one, but the connection was 115 Kbps. Surely I could do better than that.

The next place had a 28.8 Kbps modem. 28.8? Dear lord. I haven't talked in units that small since the Stone Age. What's next, 14.4?

The next place had a 56K, and the next had a 56K that consistently connected at 33K. Finally, I was willing to believe that all of Jaisalmer was dial up. I found another place with 115k (by now I was inside the fort walls), and planted myself.

The power went out 15 minutes later, and stayed off for the next 15 minutes, at which point I decided to go have dinner. I was feeling a bit tired of Indian, so I went to a place called Little Italy and got a pizza. It was surprisingly tasty.

By this time the power had come back on, but I was too tired to hike back up the hill to the internet café, so I walked back to my hotel and went to bed.

The next morning when I woke up my eyes were fire-red and were expelling an abnormal amount of goop. Worried I might have pink eye, I didn’t put in my contacts and hoped for the best. But given that I’d been taking my contacts in and out for with less-than-clean hands for over three weeks now, I guess it really shouldn’t surprise me that my eyes had finally protested.

I watched some more US Open and then showered and went to the front desk to check out. The hotel owner and his cronies pitched a fit. Why you leave so soon? No camel safari? You should go on camel safari! Then they spoke amongst themselves in Hindi, which I find to be quite rude given that they were obviously talking about me and how I had lied my way out of being constantly harassed to book a camel safari. But what were they going to do now? I offered them the money for the room, and all they could do was take it and shut up.

I walked out of the hotel with my backpack on my back and a sense of victory in my heart. It's quite sad, I must admit, when I feel it's a victory to 1) stay at a hotel, 2) pay the asking price, 3) check out without problem, and 4) never have to buy anything additional to keep from getting kicked out of the hotel. But still, it was a victory, and just from looking at the hotel guys' faces I could tell that they knew they'd been beat at their own game.

I went back to the internet cafe in the fort that I had used last night, and within 20 minutes of sitting down the power had gone out again. This time, it stayed out for four hours. Apparently this is a normal occurrence in Jaisalmer.

While I waited for the power to come back on I purchased some books from a shop down the street. They're all paperback, so they shouldn’t add too much weight to my pack. I got The Kite Runner, God of Small Things, Freakonomics, and Siddhartha (which I've read, but which I thought might be appropriate to read again considering I didn't really “get it” back in high school).

The power stayed off, and the book shop owner handed me another book, Are You Experienced? by William Sutcliffe, and told me I could read it while I waited. The book was exactly what I needed. A satire of the backpacking scene in India, it's about a first-time backpacker named Dave who goes to India with his best friend's girlfriend, Liz, because he has a big crush on her. The book is great at exposing all the hypocrisy and BS in backpacking culture, but in the end I found myself somewhere in between Dave (who knows nothing about the Third World, doesn't care to, is totally cynical and skeptical of all the backpackers who are having spiritual awakenings, and only wants to finish the trip to India to prove he can do it) and Liz (who has one of said spiritual awakenings, hugs beggars, and generally finds peace with the earth). It seriously makes you wince to hear the clichéd garbage that comes out of Liz's mouth, and in general you sympathize with Dave's position, but in the end he's also an idiot who legitimately knows nothing of life outside of London. No one in the book is totally likeable, in the end. And the book itself is no great work of literature, but it does paint an accurate portrait of India’s backpacker scene and is worth a quick read.

I didn't finish the book before the power came back on, so I asked the shop owner how much it cost, and it was Rs 120, so I bought it, which of course was the guy's goal from the beginning.

At this point it was almost 2pm, so I got a bit of writing done and then made for my 4pm train.

I caught a rickshaw to the train station, and by now my eyes were even redder and hurt whenever they were exposed to sunlight. Better still, the train was three hours delayed (and it ended up being four). And my eyes hurt too much to read. Thankfully, my iPod was fully charged.

We finally boarded the train just before 8pm, and I immediately attempted to get some sleep. I think I napped for a couple hours, but I woke up with my eyes hurting far worse than they had before. I walked the length of the car, asking if anyone spoke English, and as luck would have it the first guy who did also had pink eye, and had some Cipro eye drops with him. He gave me two, and then I sat with his family for a bit. They seemed genuinely concerned for me, and were extremely helpful (they even wrote down the name of the drug in Hindi so I could show it to a pharmacist in Jaipur).

These Indians were kind, warm, and totally willing to help me out. It was refreshing to talk with them. And afterward, I talked with some guys who were in the military and were heading home after some training. Like the Indian family I had just met, these men were warm and friendly, and they asked me what I thought of the Indians I met so far. Not one to avoid confrontation, I told them that for the most part, I couldn't stand the Indians that I had met. They nodded understandingly and said that the uneducated, lower-class Indians were “No-good liars.” It was at that point that I realized how clearly everything in India was divided by socioeconomic status (and formerly, caste). Am I really supposed to hate lower-class Indians because they lie to me and cheat me, or am I supposed to feel sorry for them because of how badly they've been oppressed, both by colonial powers and by other Indians? The “right” answer is obvious, but I can tell you that it’s very difficult to keep from harboring resentment toward people who seem to exist to make my life miserable.

Anyhow, the soldiers also gave me some whiskey and water, which I initially refused, but they insisted to the point that I thought I would offend them if I didn't drink it. So I did, and it was awful, but that's only because I hate whiskey.

I finally excused myself and went back to my bed, where I listened to my iPod and got some more sleep (my eyes were feeling a little better post-eye drops). Just before Jaipur the guy with the eye drops let me use a couple more, and then we arrived in the Jaipur train station, where I had been once before on my way from Delhi to Bundi.