And in Jaisalmer I went back to a hotel where I had much enjoyed myself seven years earlier. Though it was not quite first light when I disembarked from the overnight train from Jaipur at Jaisalmer, I got an auto which took me up into the fort where I identified almost immediately the hotel in which I had had a delightful time seven years earlier. The auto driver as usual offered me tours, including to the desert which I had thought I would like to venture into again, but sensibly I made no commitment since it seemed better to give my custom to the hotel. My train to Delhi was in the very early hours, nearly three days later, and I needed to keep them happy so that I could be taken to the station at 1 am.





Fortunately the manager was awake so the massive door was opened when I knocked and he and his assistant seemed delighted to welcome someone who had stayed there before, though they obviously could not recognize me. But they were patient as I inspected the rooms and found the one I had stayed in, which had a window in an extension upward of the city wall. The door opened from a corridor which formed a balcony above an open space below, and ended in two sides of a square that provided quarters for the waiters.
But they were all asleep, and it was the assistant manager who brought me my coffee to the upper terrace with its fantastic views, of the battlements of the building as well as the city wall and the area beyond the fort. The sun was rising as I sat there, with across the way an old man also enjoying the morning ambience, though his back was turned to the sunrise.
There was an inner terrace there too, with bodies wrapped in blankets, from which slowly heads emerged. But it took time for the waiters to become functional so I used the internet, much better than it had been the last time for there were no problems on the upper terrace, or in the room, and then one of them brought me breakfast.
I had thought to collapse then, but after a bath, for which they obligingly provided a bucket of hot water, I had what became a favourite, their lemon ginger tea, and then I went exploring. The Jain temples I had much admired the last time were now charging an unconscionable rate for I had said I was from Sri Lanka, so I skipped those and then walked to the entrance gate to the fort – the last of several from the bottom of the path up the hill on which the fort is set.
The pictures are of my first glimpse of that upper terrace of the Paradise Hotel, the sunrise, followed by a view behind, the sleeping waiters on the next terrace and the battlements behind, and finally in the left corner the old gentleman who was my silent companion that day and the next, another aficionado of dawn over Jaisalmer.