On the way to Jodhpur, or a little temple and chillies

And then we set off to our next destination – to the incredible all blue town of Johdpur. By then I fully recovered from my dehli-belliness and we generally felt rested and ready to discover India (which admittedly was so much easier to do once we had our own car with a driver;))

Whilst sleepily driving on an empty and deserted road, I spotted what looked like a small temple at the top of a high mountain. This was in the middle of nowhere and so looked doubly enticing. We had to stop.

You know, to be really honest with you, by that time we’d already felt pretty ‘templed out’, but this little temple changed the way I felt about temples in India, and more generally about spirituality/religion in this county (I can’t say just ‘religion’ since it seems to transcend our standard notion of it. I see it more as mystical spirituality with lots of Gods and idols. I’ll talk about it more separately, but I’ve found it fascinating the way Hinduism, Islam, Jainism and even Christianity all mingled together in India).

We walked up a very steep staircase whilst I was constantly looking around the stones, fearing scorpions and snakes. When we finally reached the top I was surprised to see a really tiny construction with brightly coloured locked doors. We were the only people in that temple! This was the first time we’d ever been in a temple completely on our own. That, and being on a windy top of a mountain made it very special for me.






We took our shoes off and walked into the temple bowing our heads (or more likely crawled in, as the size of the temple was about 1.5 meter to 1.5) and sat on our knees. We then hit the drums next to Kali to call her - later we found out that the drums were there for her to call people to her, not the other way round. We lit a stick of incense and ate the sweets we had with us (it is very common to make offerings and consume sweets in temples), touched our lips and then the figures of Shiva and Kali (as this was their temple) We then sat a bit in silence before making our way back to the car…I felt a bit closer to the ‘real’ India somehow.

We continued along that road, and an hour later Jonny spotted another beautiful scene: large circles of red in the middle of an empty field with colourful figures all around it.

They were packing red chillies - tons of them (well, maybe many-many kgs:)). And the smell…it’s difficult to describe just how fantastic drying in the sun chillies smell!

We approached the people packing the chilles (mostly women, as it is normally the case. I’ve noticed that a lot of physical labour is done by women in India) and chatted to them. Or to be more accurate we exchanged a few gestures of friendliness:) (not entirely free of charge friendliness though;). I still have a couple of those bright red chillies in my bag. Am going to make my first real curry with them when I’m back!

And we moved on again…very close to our destination we went through an area that was basically like a natural animal reserve. The fields all around us were filled with wild animals! Cows, black buffalos, peacocks, goats and even antelopes. We were especially lucky on that day – Mulchand (our driver) cried out, showing us to the right of the car. There was a very rare black antelope. It’s a very graceful animal, which I thought looked a bit like an antelope/panda:) It had circles around its eyes and had white underbelly. The most amazing feature was its horns though. Just have a look…