“Padharo Mhare Des”: ~3600km Rajasthan Bike Ride 2021 - Part 2

Sometimes you find beauty in unexpected places. And yes the above place is in Rajasthan!!!

A quick recap, Ashish and I started our Rajasthan bike ride on Dec 21, 2020. During the first four days of our trip, we had covered Mumbai to Udaipur, Udaipur sightseeing, Longewala, Tanot Mata Mandir, and stayed at Sam Sand Dunes. On Day 5, after experiencing the mesmerizing sunrise at Sam Sand Dunes, and exploring Jaisalmer Fort, we started our ride to Jodhpur, the Blue City of India. In case you missed it, read the first four days of our trip in the Part 1 of the blog.

But before we move to the next part of the trip, enjoy pictures of the awesome roads and desert scenery of the Jaisalmer - Longewala route:

Day 5 | Ride to Blue City of India (Jodhpur): Our original plan was to ride from Jaisalmer to Bikaner, stay for the night, and reach Jaipur the next day. Then after exploring Jaipur, cover Jodhpur in the return leg. Given that we had no plans to explore Bikaner we tinkered the itinerary and decided to ride to Jodhpur first and then proceed to Jaipur. If you ride from Jaisalmer to Jodhpur, you need to take a right from Pokhran. Both Ashish and I were excited about Pokhran (for obvious reasons)  and had decided to make a scheduled stop at Pokhran. However, on-route to Jodhpur, you don't enter or cross Pokhran town but take a right to avoid entering the town, so we had to make good with the town banner 😞.

Jodhpur is ~280km from Jaisalmer Fort, so with highway in excellent condition, we were covering distance at a good pace. We stopped 80km before Jodhpur for a tea break and decided to book the hotel as well. What we missed was that it was not just Saturday but also 25th Dec and that means yearend holiday season has started. After multiple calls to 100 or so hotels, and non-availability we finally found a place at Hotel Siddharth International. The property was new with huge lawn and has been built primarily to cater wedding functions, didn't have restaurant and overall was average. Good thing was, the sightseeing places were quite nearby to the hotel.

Day 6 | Jodhpur sightseeing: Our first stop was Mehrangarh Fort, which is one of the most massive forts I have seen, covering ~1200 acres located on hilltop around ~120 mtr above the plain built by the Marwar family. Fortunately, we could drive our bikes right up to the fort's parking near the main entrance. We had our breakfast inside the fort, Kachori chat and saffron lassi; chat was good but the lassi was amazing. After having our fill, we spend the next few hours exploring the fort and in my view, Mehrangarh Fort was the best of all the Forts we visited during our Rajasthan trip. It had all components of the fort, it had a few aspects of palace as well. In addition the museum inside was one of the better ones.

These Rajput royals claimed themselves to be descendants of Sun/Moon/Fire, i.e. they were Suryavanshis (descendants of Lord Rama) or Chandravanshis (descendants of Lord Krishna). I believe they did it to establish the lineage superiority of the royal family and hence their entitlement to rule over these lands. 

Post enjoying our time exploring the fort, we headed to Jaswant Thada. It is a cenotaph and serves as the cremation ground for the Marwar royal family built by Maharaja Sardar Singh in 1899. The building itself has a striking appearance to it, the entire building made of white marble sitting on top of a red sandstone base.

While Jodhpur is known as the 'Blue City', one can experience this only by visiting the old part of the city, which we couldn't, owing to the lack of time. There are multiple reasons on the internet on why people of Jodhpur started painting their houses blue, but for me it was disturbing to know that this was done to identify their caste and separate the Brahmin households from the lower caste ones. 

Day 7 | Ride from the Blue City (Jodhpur) to the Pink City (Jaipur): This time we decided to book the hotel in Jaipur a day in advance. After much online exploration, we booked Hotel Marigold for 3000/- per night. We had to book this hotel, which is 15-20km outside the main city as even the basic decent hotel in the city were expensive or simply not available given the holiday season.

The ride from Jodhpur to Beawar was a delight - excellent highway with everchanging rural scenery. But that changes as soon as you join NH58 at Beawar for Jaipur. This is the main highway till Delhi thus the truck and other four-wheeler traffic increase multi-fold making the ride a bit irritating.

Earlier, in Jodhpur, I came across pictures of a place with a striking turquoise water lake, and beautiful sparkling white surroundings while randomly browsing through social media. The pictures appeared completely surreal and to my surprise, this place was in Rajasthan and on our way to Jaipur. First, have a glimpse of the place before I write more about it:

This is a dump yard, yes you read it right a dump yard at Kishangarh. It is ~250km from Jodhpur, on the way to Jaipur. Kishangarh economy mainly depends on marble trading. All the marble waste has been dumped at this place and it turned into this beautiful place. If you are passing by, make sure to stop by this place, I'm pretty sure it will turn out to be the surprise package in your itinerary. The local management has constructed proper changing rooms in addition to the wash room as people come here for a photoshoot. We also found from a local that there is another dump yard, much better maintained but is not open for the general public; only movie shooting is allowed. After spending a couple of hours at this place we headed towards Jaipur. 

We reached our hotel by evening and the hotel turned out to be another surprise. Good property, clean spacious room, access to the roof, super courteous and helpful staff. We had tried the famous Lalmaas at Khama Ghani restaurant, Udaipur. It was quite good, but we liked the one served by Hotel Marigold much more.

Day 8 | Jaipur sightseeing: Before the sightseeing we wanted to experience another thing that Jaipur is famous for - Pyaaz Kachori and Rawat Misthan Bhandar serves the best kachoris in town. This place is in the crowded part of the town, so it took us a good 45-60min to reach there. After having our fill of two kachoris each with saffron lassi, we headed for our first stop - Amer Fort or more rightly Amer Palace. 

Amer Palace was built by Raja Man Singh and later, additions were made by Sawai Jai Singh. Built on hill, it is one of the main tourist attractions, and hence largely crowded. Just like the other forts, one can drive into the fort. The problem is unlike Mehrangarh Fort, the parking space is small and poorly managed, which do result in a traffic jam inside the fort. Given it's a palace, it has a courtyard, 'Diwan-e-Aam' (Hall of Public Audience) and 'Diwan-e-Khas', and Mirror Palace. The palace lives up to the hype, and despite the crowd it was an unforgettable experience.

As I mentioned above, Amer Palace was a 'palace' and armies can't fight or defend from a palace, and hence a fort was built overlooking the palace with a secret tunnel and everything - Jaigarh Fort. It was built on a high point on the Aravalli range, called 'Cheel ka Teela' by Jai Singh II. It was primarily built to serve defense purposes, and hence it has no fancy structure but is only utilitarian. 

What is the most important thing needed if a fort is under siege - water. So, the fort was built with its  water harvesting system, and water tank so large that as per the guide, 10000 soldiers will have enough water for two years. Though I don't know what they planned to eat, but then you don't get all the answers 😊. It has a Cannon foundry and it houses the 'World's biggest cannon on wheels' of its time, and guess the name - yes it is called 'Jaivan Cannon'. Do you see a pattern here - the ruler, Jaisingh seems to be so obsessed with himself that he named everything he constructed after himself. The fort's name - Jaigarh, and the cannon - Jaivan; who knows what else he named after himself.

We took a guide at Jaigarh Fort, who took time to explain the history of the fort and its various aspect. Our next stop was Nahargarh Fort, which was built by Maharaja Sawai Singh as a place of retreat and to look over the entire city of Jaipur. We got to know that later small palaces were built inside the fort for each of his nine wives. The place doesn't give the feeling of a fortified structure like Jaigarh fort but  feels like a retreat place.

Our next stop was Jal Mahal, a palace for the summer season in the middle of the Man Sagar Lake, originally in 1699, both of which were enlarged and renovated in the 18th century. I'm surprised, he didn't change the name of the palace to 'Jai Mahal'.  

Unfortunately, a visit to the Jal Mahal was not permitted, so we spent the evening on the side of the lake and capturing nature around in our cameras. After relishing our evening, watching sunset, birds, blue sky, we headed to Babu Bazaar in the old part of the city for a bit of shopping for my kid and my better half. After shopping, we ended the day with another round of Lal Maas 😊.

Day 9 | City Palace, Jaipur and ride to Beawar: The trip was going great, but it started setting in that our epic trip was in its last phase, the return journey was about to start. We wanted to check out the City Palace, Jaipur and Hawa Mahal before starting the return leg towards Mumbai.

City Palace, Jaipur was established by Maharaja Sawai Jai Singh II at the same time as the city of Jaipur. It houses the Royal family till date, in addition to the Maharaja Sawai Man Singh II Museum. The museum, as well as the palace is worth a visit. One thing, I overheard a guide talk about (reconfirmed on Wikipedia) the Royal Women-folk. While they did follow the purdah system, they were involved in the governance of the kingdom or estate in absence of the heir, making them the alternate centre of power in the kingdom.

Photography and videography are not allowed inside the museum, housing clothes, utensils, weapons, gift items, canons, and paintings of the Royal family. However, for me the most fascinating things were the two largest silver pot in the world, which was constructed by melting 14000 silver coins over 2 years. Interestingly or rather pathetically, Maharaja Madho Singh II took these 2 jars filled with water of Ganges to England to attend the coronation of King Edward VII in 1902. 

We skipped Hawa Mahal, as we wanted to cover as much distance a possible before sunset. We reached Beawer before sunset, and could have covered another 50km, i.e. reached Bhim but we could find decent hotels in Bhim and hence decided to stay for the night at Hotel Suryamahal, Beawer. Basic hotel, but clean rooms, decent food, hot water and gated parking space settled for us.

Day 10 | Kumbhalgarh Fort and Ride from Beawar to Modasa : The plan for day 10 was to ride beyond Udaipur, at least till Kherwara which was ~300km from Beawer. We kept the target at 300km only as we wanted to visit Kumbhalgarh fort. It was a small detour, but Kumbhalgarh fort is not just another popular tourist attraction but also the birthplace of Maharana Pratap and was built by Maharana Kumbha, Great Grandfather of Maharana Sanga. The fort is also known as the Great Wall of India, as it is the second-longest wall in the world after the well known Great Wall of China. In its entire period of existence, this fort has been capture just once after a siege of 6 months - by a General of Emperor Akbar, but it was recaptured by Maharana Pratap within the next 12 month - I guess it has been captured twice and not once.

The ride from the highway to the fort and back - narrow good quality road, greenery and engaging route. We reached Kherwara later afternoon, so we decided to ride ahead till Modasa.

Day 11 | Ride from Modasa to Mumbai : We started early as we had to cover ~550km. The ride back home was more or less uneventful. Given the highway condition, we covered good ground and reached Ahura by afternoon and decided to have our late lunch - Keema Pav was awesome as always. I reached home by 6:30pm and that was the end of our epic bike trip to Rajasthan.

End of  3600km bike ride (Ignore the clock!)

There were so many high points in the entire trip, but the highlight was the Jaisalmer leg and Kishangarh was the surprise package. 

Our country offers such diverse and rich experience, it would take more than a life time to cover just the main attraction. For every main attraction/ tourist point, you have multiple local unknown and undiscovered points. I would consider myself very lucky if I can complete just my bucket list which keeps growing everyday. So keep riding, keep discovering!!!

Not going to repeat the mistake I made in Blog's Part 1 😄: 

Thanking my amazing WIFE who allows me to go on LONG BIKE RIDES!!!