Our journey to Johdpur was an adventure. Our bus was a comfortable sleeper bus, with bunks up top and seats below. We were the first batch of customers aboard and the number ebbed and flowed along the way, but in general only seemed to grow. Whole families packed the sleeper bunks designed for two people and the isle filled quickly and the crowd only thinned at times. I had a single seat and wasn't approached with requests to share, but some or the members of our group found themselves sharing the armrest or half their chair with single passengers or parts of families along the way. Toward the end of the journey, we even had roof top passengers, who must have been clinging for dear life when our driver got into a high speed horn blasting, race with a competitor bus line along a curvy stretch of busy highway. Apparently, our driver wanted to pass the other bus in hopes of picking up additional passengers!?! Where, he was planning on stowing them, I haven't a clue. In the end he gave up chase; and shortly thereafter, we passed a gruesome motorcycle accident, which was sobering enough to keep the driver's speed down the rest of the trip.
We arrived in Johdpur in the evening, but were still able to catch the last of the setting sun as it silhouetted the city's forts, which rose from red stone cliffs and towered above our Haveli Hotel below. The city is known as the blue city because of the extensive number of properties painted blue, which once was a color reserved for houses of the upper Brahman caste, but is now used by any caste. In the morning, we toured the fort and palace, which was impressive for similar sandstone lattice work as we saw in Jaisalmer. However, unlike Jaisalmer's fancy exteriors and weathered/gutted interiors, the palace at Johdpur had impressive rooms, cannons, carriages, weapons and art on display. Some of the more gruesome parts of the fort's history was the story of a man that volunteered to be buried alive within the walls to abate a curse of poor water supply, which was wished on the kingdom by the hills first resident who was kicked off his land to make way for the fort/palace. The second, more recent was the trampling of devotees at the fort's temple during a religious festival in 2008. In a sad irony, around 150 died and 100 more were injured when the crowd surged and people slid down the steep walkway to the temple on the milk of coconuts, which were meant to be offerings to the goddess for good fortune. I visited the temple as preparations were being made for the same festival one year later and learned of the tragedy only after I had visited.
In the afternoon, we took a trip to the Umaid Bhawan Palace, which claims to be the largest in India, but so does the City Palace in Udaipur. At any rate, the palace is relatively young and was started in 1929 and took 3000 workers 15 years to complete. It was the Maharaja's 'philanthropic' way of creating jobs, similar to the Civil Conservation Corps project to employ people in the US during the same era. I must say, I enjoy the public park projects that the government funded in the states a little more, especially since the public is allowed to use the parks while most of the palace is restricted the the Maharajah's family or guests in the section that has been converted into a hotel.
During our last evening in Johdpur, my roommate and I went out with our guide, Raj, for a late night dinner with some of his local friends. It was a lot of fun hanging out and drinking with them, but my roommate and I were still quite full from our dinner earlier in the evening. We ended up stuffing ourselves, because the food and company was great, but wished we would have skipped dinner earlier that evening. The next morning, we were up early to take a tour of rural pottery and rug shops, as well as a opium ceremony on our way to Udaipur.
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