Mumbai and Jaisalmer

Last Friday Hannah and I rolled into Mumbai’s Victoria Terminus at 5:30 in the morning and joined the crowds hunched by their luggage, drinking chai and waiting for the city to wake up. Pale gray light filtered through the overhead windows and we noticed that the worn Victorian ornaments, like those on plenty of Mumbai’s old buildings, seem to be straining under the needs of one of the world’s largest cities.

Outside the wide intersections and commuter hustle reminded me of Chicago, and it was good to be in a city again. We stayed downtown, ate non-Indian meals like bacon and eggs and imagined what it would be like to live in the city, join the hustle, sample the night life, and figure out the bus system. We found a cheap, sketchy, and friendly place to stay only a block south of the Taj hotel, which might be my favorite building in India. (I haven’t seen the real Taj yet, but India’s premier luxury hotel chain shares the name.)

There was an arts festival going on that weekend, including a Saturday night outdoor jazz concert that we couldn’t afford. So we stood outside the fence, right next to the Arabian Sea, and had a merry time peeking in on Ravi Coltrane and friends, much like we did with Santana in Frankurt last July.

Now we’re in Jaisalmer, a small town in western Rajasthan, slowing down our traveling pace and preparing to return to Woodstock. Everything in Jaisalmer is made of sandstone and glows in warm sun light, including the 800 year old fort that dominates the place. It’s an historic landmark, for sure, but it’s also a living home to dozens of hotels, restaurants, souvenier-wallahs, a few Jain temples and a few hundred residents. The kind of thing that would be encased in glass in America, and here you can rent a room and ride a rickshaw through it.

We came here to meet a couple of Woodstock friends who had already booked a camel safari in the desert, so we spent two and a half bouncy, chaffing days with them on camels, which aren’t my favorite transportation. I liked the nights camping better, catching up with Angie and Kaitlin on travel stories and trying to find the right combination of chai, shawls, butter chicken and whisky to stay warm around the camfire.

I’ve been shoveling all kinds of sensory input into my pack for six weeks now, and the pack’s about full, and my guess is that I’ll be unpacking for quite some time, so I’ll save the rest of the stories for another day.