As our Indian Cycling Holiday trip emerged from the enchanting dust bowls of rural Rajasthan and made for the city of Jodhpur, our hearts leapt with anxiety and anticipation.
Chronology matters. It is one thing if you fly straight into Jodhpur and set about exploring the city without much geographical and cultural reference of the other parts of the vast land of Rajasthan. But it is a different ball game altogether if you cycle through the hinterland – like we all have on this wonderful Rajasthan Cycling Tour – exploring its culture, meeting the local people, witnessing their lifestyles at close hand and pedaling tirelessly through a scrubby but spellbinding landscape to come upon a bustling city with all the traffic and crowds and shops and touts and hotels and restaurants and palaces and forts and temples and gardens. Traversing the distance, you get a context to better enjoy your Rajasthan holiday trip.
For anyone on Rajasthan vacation in India, Jodhpur, as a city, looks little different from other Indian cities at first glance. But spend a little time and you find the city’s ancient heritage dripping from many nooks and crannies.
Just walking through the old part of the city, one comes upon ancient havelis with their fading architectural splendor. Once these structures must have been artworks in their own right. Now, to a traveler on Indian vacation, they seem dilapidated remnants of their past glory. The mix of nostalgia and neglect is melancholic. One can’t help wanting to step inside one of these ancient Rajasthani havelis and exploring their interiors and getting to know the people who live therein.
The mind brims over with curiosity. The heart yearns for a secret tale. That is how the magic of Jodhpur rubs off on you. That is how it captivated everyone on our Rajasthan biking trip.
All this even before we set out to explore the famous tourist places of Jodhpur, the most prominent of which is the majestic Mehrangarh fort. Built on a hill overlooking the city, the fort towers over Jodhpur like a formidable sentinel, a protective guardian, a watchful sovereign. The name ‘Mehrangarh’ literally means the ‘Sun fort’ and it is from this fort the city of Jodhpur derives the epithet of the ‘Sun City’.
Taking a break from our Indian biking tour, we hitchhiked our way to the fort quite early in the morning. The day was sunny and the sky was a brilliant azure, making a perfect background for the brown and beige Mehrangarh. On closer approach, we better appreciated the size and magnitude of the fort. Walls crested with ramparts stood as high as 120 feet. Inside, the fort turned out to be still bigger. It swarmed with vacationers on Jodhpur holiday trip.
Many episodes of history were played out in this fort, as a guide we hired for the tour of Mehrangarh fort informed us. The construction of the fort began in the year 1459 when the Rathore king and warrior Rao Jodha shifted the capital of his Marwar kingdom from nearby Mandore to Jodhpur. Successive kings continued building and expanding the fort till its completion in the 17th century. When completed, the fort spread over an area of 5km and stood 410 feet above the surrounding city.
A formidable structure, the Mehrangarh fort was the envy of rival kingdoms but all attempts to invade it remained futile. To this day, the pockmarks of cannonballs of the attacking armies of Jaipur can be seen on the second gate of the fort. In total, the fort has seven gates and ramparts as wide as 70 feet to accommodate cannons, some of which can still be seen pointing towards the city.
Our Rajasthan holiday biking tour group made the most of the time available and cruised through the palaces and museum within the fort. The most crowd-pulling attraction was the gilded royal palanquin called Mahadol which the valiant Rathores won in a 1730 battle. On display were many royal costumes, cribs, paintings, furniture and weaponry. We marveled at the serene beauty of a dancing hall and saw the blue-painted houses of Jodhpur city from the high ramparts of the fort.
These beautiful blue houses lend Jodhpur the other epithet of the ‘Blue City’.
Frankly, the Mehrangarh Fort is big enough to take up the whole day of a vacationer on India travel tour, but we managed to keep the second half of the day for other popular tourist attractions of Jodhpur. Namely, the Umaid Bhavan Palace which, believe it or not, is one of the largest private residences in the world and is occupied by the scion of the dynasty of Maharaja Umaid Singh, who commissioned the building of the palace in the first half of the 20th century simply to give employment and financial succour to the local farmers reeling under the effects of a devastating famine.
Today, one part of the palace has been turned into a hotel, another part into a museum and the remaining is still the royal residence. The palace is built over an area of 26 acres and is an epitome of luxury, fine art, and architecture. It houses a throne chamber, banquet halls, 347 rooms, tennis courts, spas, swimming pools, and a billiards room. The architecture of the palace is a mix of Indo-Gothic and Art Deco styles. The museum garden displays vintage cars of the former maharajas of Jodhpur, and all of them are still in mint condition.
For the remainder of the Jodhpur day tour, we visited the other tourist hotspots like the Jaswant Thada which is a cremation ground for the Jodhpur royals and has a cenotaph dedicated to Maharaja Jaswant Singh II. It is a mausoleum with gazebos, gardens and a beautiful lake. Quite a peaceful place to while away one’s time.
Just a few kilometers out of Jodhpur we stopped by at Balsamand Lake Palace, which is built next to the namesake lake. A little way further on, we visited the famous Mandore Gardens which is home to many cenotaphs of former rulers of Jodhpur. The gardens of Mandore also have a number of temples dedicated to different deities.
The hours flew by as we explored these monuments and memorials. One day is a tad short to explore Jodhpur if you are a sucker for history and culture like we on this Rajasthan biking expedition are. But we ended the day perfectly content that we had made the most of it.
Late at night, our entire group of Rajasthan cyclists moved to the terrace of the hotel for a few drinks and raised a toast to Jodhpur under the canopy of bright stars in a clear sky.
