Our weak tourist guts couldn't hang...
March 3, 2023
After we somehow completed the Golden Triangle, we made our way on to our next city, Jodhpur! Jodhpur is known as the blue city and was our first trip off the main tourist path.
Getting there was NOT easy. Our train ended up getting delayed like… 11 hours and made us get in around 2am. And from everything I read… wandering train stations and cities in India isn’t exactly ideal at that time!
We decided against calling a cab because we were booked in a pedestrian only part of the city… so we had to stay the night. We walked around the city for a while to a hotel that had good reviews online. We show up… the building is empty!
We walk back to the train station and I’m thinking to myself “oh my god! we’re going to have to stay up here all night!” We look over and see another hotel open.. But blocked off.
We climb over a cement wall and throw our bags over… and the lobby is open! We pay an exorbitant price and get a room. It was.. Filthy. Unwashed bedding. They even served us unfiltered and opened waters (we passed on that)… But at least we had somewhere safe to stay for the night!
And the bed was comfy to to be honest!
Troubles aside, the city was super cool to see! Our Homestay had an awesome hiking path to some sites, got another full dose of beautiful historic spots, some of which were in movie sets!) and fantastic hospitality.
We also got to meet the city’s youngest elected representative, who let us help paint the city blue, and told us about how they’re improving the city in hopes of more tourism. Then we were lucky enough to meet a locally known volunteer who’s cleaning up the city too!
But we had our frustrations here too… we had more than a few scary run-ins with stray dogs (they had it OUT for Alan for some reason – thank god there were always people around to help) and rideshare scams were everywhere… But other than those issues it was a very cool city and it definitely seems like it’s coming up!!
Unfortunately it was in Jodhpur where I started to get suuuuuper sick. I think I may have had water that wasn’t correctly filtered. I don’t know (but our homestay’s filtered water smelled an awful lot like the open sewers around town)! Whatever the cause (almost certainly Giardia lol), I was to the point where I lost interest in all food, eating always made me sick (it did not help that everything was curried!), and I was just getting exhausted after losing a fair amount of weight and continually getting more ill.
Having already struggled with finding the correct medication when Alan got super sick in Jaipur (luckily his didn’t last as long 😮💨) as well as the long-term effects from air pollution, we decided to cut our trip to India short and start making our way out before it got any worse.
So then we went back to Jaipur… and I was so sick the entire time so I did nothing except lay in bed. Literally didn’t even leave the hotel once… until we caught our flight out!
After our crazy little trip to India we decided to take a weeklong “layover” in Bangkok, which is on the way to our next stop! We didn’t do a ton in Bangkok. But we did get some medicine that took care of our illness, got to make some new friends, and got to see a big cat show!
Anyways, that’s all for now, see ya in the next country!
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