Everything about Jaisalmer that you read, or hear as you travel: The Desert.
Yet we had decided from the start that we ‘probably’ wouldn’t go to the desert. The more we heard, the stronger that probability became.
The only desert that seemed to be on offer was a desert of camel safaris, or that other ‘safari’ they offer - churning up the sand dunes in a jeep. Neither of them conjured up the tranquility of the desert. We only had three days in Jaisalmer and Jaisalmer was to give us all the tranquility we needed and our short conversation with a young couple from the Netherlands reassured us that we had not altogether made the wrong decision. The picture they painted of the vast tented camps and loud music late into the evenings - not our desert.
Even in the absence of sand dunes, Jaisalmer feels like a desert city, it’s fort seems to rise out of the sand floating above the city on a dune of its own. The only ‘living’ fort we are to visit in India. It was every bit the monument to the might of the Mughal Emperors who had built it and lived in it, but the desert people who had flocked to it as if to an oasis had left their mark too, yet left it seemingly unscarred.
Jaisalmer, that desert city, had all the calm we needed as we sat by its lake and wove our way through its tiny streets and alleyways, but nothing can take away that feeling that you may have missed something. Even the knowledge that you had made the most rational of choices.
I am sure it is a feeling that will rise again on this trip.
