Balaji Resort Bikaner

Bikaner is a twelve hour overnight train from Delhi and is a big contrast to other cities with wide roads, fairly spread out buildings and a much gentler pace to it. It is on the edge of the Great Indian Desert (Thar) and our choice for an overnight camel safari. We had loosely booked a room and safari with a guesthouse that is mentioned in Rough Guide, The Camel Man. The camel man or otherwise known as Vijay Singh (not the famous golfer), is eccentricity personified. In his broken Queens ...

... palace/forts we've seen... see the pictures here), and went directly to the temple. <br><br>We caught a Rickshaw for around rs 300 (about a 30 min ride each way), removed our shoes (customary at temples), bought some candies to feed the rats, and went in. <br><br>It was really just amazing to see. While I suppose my head had thoughts of thousands of rats flooded knee-high across the floor; rats stuck in doorways and just cascading ...

... eat food that has been nibbled by the rats!!! needless to say we didn't take part in that aspect but we did walk around and inside the temple with hundreds of rats walking all around the place freely - and you can't wear shoes! That night we got the 2am train to Amritser

... to visit just after high noon was filled with thousands of rats...and our bare feet. Taj mhal--shoe condoms. Rat temple---nada, zippo, zilch. Man it was ****in gross. Hooper being the big and bad KIWI he is, lasted all of about ten minutes. <br><br> Ben and I didn't do much better but I did manage to get one of the first in a soon to be long list of many "varee gud luk" signs. If a rat scampers across your feet ...

... anglais marié, une pour les garçons et une pour les filles. Les chameliers eux dorment sous les charettes, il se sont confectionné un petit abris. En fait nous, nous avons dormis a cinq collé les uns contres les autres pour avoir plus chaud. Nous avions pourtant bu une bouteille de rhum pas tres fort pour nous réchauffer en jouant au uno( un jeu de carte). Moi ça m a juste donné envie de continuer à boire mais comme il n'y avait plus rien j ai bien du me résigner ! Avant ...

... we were from. They thought Bobbie was German, because of the dorky hat she was wearing. We also got good at steering the camels after the first incident of running up against a jeep, and the camel just standing in the middle of the track. Watching the sun set over the dunes while the camel driver and guide cooked dinner over the campfire was definitely a magical experience. The nights and mornings were a little cool but it warmed up ...

... the mattress and one single dirty and stained sheet that simply overlapped the top edge of the smelly, dirty quilt. When I had calmed down, I chose to sleep in my clothes and we covered our pillows with my pashminas. David and I became hysterical as we tried to sleep. We just looked at our room and howled with laughter. Our room was like a museum. Rammed full of British Empire framed newspaper cuttings, old tobacco boxes, gilt-framed paintings of Kings and ...

Next we headed onto Bikaner - the place where the famous rat temple (Kama Matra) resides. Bikaner was a nice enough city, but the main attraction (besides a really nice ice-cream shop and having the first supermarket we have seen since being in India) is the rat temple. I was worried there would not be enough rats to make it freaky, but boy was I wrong. Being a temple you have to ...

... exhausted Lou decided to go on an excursion to the camel farm!Tamsin stayed behind. At the camel breeding research centre there were hundreds of camels big small studs and pregnant shecamels and lots of not so small horse sizxed babies.AT the gift shpo run by the government (which meant fixed but reasonable prioces) mos tof the group bought something, Lou got a painted leaf.its better then it sounds!She tried camel icecream it was suposed to be chocolate but just because things ...

... Raju, he was tall and golden coloured. He seemed to be the moody one and kept trying to bite the bum of the camel in front. I think he thought all the other camels were after his bum too, as whenever there were camels behind us he kept looking around suspiciously to see what the others were up to. I was pleased that my camelier was the most authentic looking, with his turban and dhoti (ghandi nappy). Although he only broke his taciturn demeanour towards me ...