Rajasthan – Land of the Kings. Land of the sweaty armpits more like! Travelling through the hottest part of the country on the cusp of summer is strictly for mad dogs and Englishmen only, but those willing to brave the fifty degree heat are rewarded with a region widely considered to be the ‘real India’.

Our circuit of this sandy state began in Jaipur, which has the world’s largest sundial and a whole street selling nothing but cooking utensils. After we’d finished marvelling at the oversized timepiece and dazzling array of chapatti pans, we made our way back to our hotel along a disconcertingly empty street. Suddenly a gang of grubby-faced street urchins streamed out of a side alley, running towards us in a herd, screaming and then grabbing at our belongings as they caught up with us. Our first reaction was to walk briskly away from them with our heads down. As were were employing this rather pathetic tactic one of Pip’s bags split open and her newly purchased jeans fell on the floor. Big mistake Street Rats – no one tries to steal Pipa’s shopping!

Drawing her recently purchased souvenir umbrella, she wielded it like a sword, catching one of the children in the chest and causing the others to draw back. The kids were clearly startled by this aggressive foreigner, but quickly regrouped and formed a semi-circle around us. “Get away from us you little shits” shouted Pip, now adopting a fencing stance.

This amazing display of bravery brought us precious seconds to pick up our shopping and make a dash for it across four lanes of traffic to the relative safety of the other side of the road. We looked back to see the kids being rounded up and scolded by adults. Presumably they were saying something along the lines of  “next time you see an English couple, go for the man’s stuff, their women are tough!”

After that little encounter we decided that Jaipur was not for us so jumped on a bus to our next stop, Pushkar.

Pushkar is a small sand-locked town with one of the only Brahma temples in the world. The whole town surrounds a water tank where the local women wash their silk and a camel fair happens once a year which draws traders from all over the world. None of them make for as good blog material as the scam that the locals try on us tourists.

Before you’ve taken four steps from the safety of your hotel a local man will approach you, shove a flower into your hand and escort you to the local water temple for a blessing. You arrive, cupping your flower as if it were a newborn mouse, and then hand it carefully to a holy man who sets it afloat on the lake, and then offers a blessing for each member of your family. How lovely, you might be thinking, but unfortunately these holy men are about as pious as Soho sex workers, and start demanding huge amounts of rupees for each one of your family that they have blessed. “Surely they are worth it?”, they ask earnestly.  Luckily we were warned about the scam so politely returned the flowers and pushed the holy men in the water.*

A five-hour taxi journey out of Pushkar and we were in Bundi, which is so small and remote that we were pretty much the only westerners there. The lack of pasty-faced foreigners might have also been down to the temperature of the place, which was mildly cooler than the surface of the sun. After about 11am we were rendered so useless by the heat that we could only just summon enough energy to raise a glass of beer to our parched lips and then crawl back to our hotel room for a blast on the air conditioning.

Being a proactive couple we made the most of our downtime and asked our hotelier to teach us Hindi. Over the next few days he taught us a fair amount including how to count to 100, ask the price of something and compliment a woman on the size of her breasts. These lessons served us well for the rest of our trip, cutting down the price of our rickshaws and bringing a look of surprised glee to the face of many an Indian.

It was wedding season in Rajasthan while we were travelling through, and it was in Bundi that we witnessed our first wedding procession, which is nothing short of a street riot. The groom leads the way, riding a garishly decorated horse, followed closely by his male friends, all drunk as skunks and dancing wildly to music blasted out of a massive sound system. The bride and her friends bring up the rear, all staring disapprovingly at the men.

Pip and I were quickly manhandled into the separate groups and encouraged to dance while they all clapped and whooped around us.  The people of Bundi now believe English men to dance with their feet firmly rooted to the ground while alternating between clicking their fingers and clapping.

We left Bundi by sleeper bus at midnight, and seven bone-shaking hours later, we arrived in Jodhpur, famous for lending its name to the leggings worn by horse riders everywhere. We were disappointed to find that not all of the residents of Jodhpur wear jodhpurs, but the town itself made up for this, being a beautiful blue colour and containing a network of bustling sreets, each one devoted to the selling of a different thing. The highlight was an amazing fort which stands imposingly on a hill overlooking the town, which we could not visit during the day because Christian Bale was in there, dressed up like Batman, presumably the for new movie.

We had heard rumours of sati on our travels around India – the practice of a Hindu widow throwing herself on the funeral pyre of her husband, killing herself and honouring him, and it was in the fort that we saw the first evidence of this. On one the walls were a chilling cluster of handprints left by the former ruler’s wives as they had left the fort on their way to do their duty at his cremation. It sent a shiver down our spines!

And on that rather sombre note, it is time to wrap up this blog, and leave the rest of Rajasthan until next time. Check back in a few days!

Michael and Pipa x

*that last part of that sentence is a lie.