Mountain Fort in Jodhpur - India Trip

I didn’t want to visit Jodhpur until I saw the picture below, which is unrealistic beautiful. I asked if the picture was real in a famous travel forum, but I didn’t get a clear answer. Half of the people thought it was fake, and half of the people believed it was real but they had no knowledge where to take a photo like this. Now, after came back from my India trip, I can tell you that this picture is real, and I will also explain to you when and where to take this photo in Jodhpur. The fort at the background and the white building at foreground were the only 2 places that I planned to visit in Jodhpur. Jodhpur is also called the “blue city” in India. From the picture you can see, many residential areas are painted in blue, this is why the city is called blue city.

Let us return to the day we drove from Udaipur to Jodhpur first. After the 6 hours long distance drive from Udaipur, when we arrived in Jodhpur it was already dark. Our hotel has a roof restaurant, which has a great view of the city and the fort.

The roof restaurant was reserved for a weeding, but I was able to get my mom and me a table before the weeding party started. The food and price were all good except it was a bit chilly, dark and lonely. It would be much nicer if my husband was with me at the moment.

The next morning, we would visit 2 places, the Mehrangarh Fort (a fort on the mountain) and Jaswant Thada (a beautiful white cenotaph), before we headed to the airport and flew back to New Delhi.

The city Jodhpur is known as the "Sun City" for the bright and sunny weather it enjoys all the year round. The old city circles the fort and is bounded by a wall with several gates. Jodhpur is also known as the "Blue City" because of the blue colors that decorate many of the houses in the old city area. However, the city has expanded greatly outside the wall over the past several decades. It is now the second largest city in the Indian state of Rajasthan and officially the second metropolitan city of the state.

The Mehrangarh Fort of Jodhpur is considered to be one of the largest forts in India. Built around 1460 by Rao Jodha, the fort is situated at an elevated platform of 410 feet (125 m) above the city and is enclosed by imposing thick walls.  A winding road leads to the fort from the city below. Our driver drove us to the bottom of the fort. The actual uphill walk was less than 5 minutes. Even my mom was not tired at all.

The entrance fee to the fort is not cheap: 600 INR per person including free audio guide in different languages (both English and Mandarin are available). Camera is 100 INR each, but cell phones are free.

The rooms inside the Mehrangarh fort are converted to a museum which documents the rich history of the ‘Rathores’ elaborately in the form of paintings, attires, arms, etc. The museum is considered as one of the most well-stocked museums in Rajasthan.

In one section of the fort museum there is a selection of old royal palanquins, including the elaborate domed gilt Mahadol palanquin which was won in a battle from the Governor of Gujarat in 1730.

It was a long way from the entrance of the museum to the exit of the museum. The museum contains multiple buildings with multiple floors. I would suggest you plan at least 1 hour for the museum. There is a clean washroom inside the museum, and a small market at the exit of the museum. Water bought a hot pink top from the market, and if we had some more time, she would do more shopping there, since the products were good and the price was right too. Inside the museum, there are many good places to take pictures.

From the Mehrangarh Fort, we saw the Jaswant Thada, it is not far. The Jaswant Thada is a cenotaph. It was built by Maharaja Sardar Singh of Jodhpur State in 1899 in memory of his father, Maharaja Jaswant Singh II, and serves as the cremation ground for the royal family of Marwar.

The mausoleum is built out of intricately carved sheets of marble. These sheets are extremely thin and polished so that they emit a warm glow when illuminated by the sun.

The cenotaph's grounds feature four carved gazebos, a tiered garden, and a small lake.

At the end of the gazebos, there is a fence door. If you step outside the fence door, and look back the Jaswant Thada, you can see a small lake and also a view as displayed in the first picture of the article: Jaswant Thada at the foreground and the Mehrangarh Fort at the background.

The entrance fee for Jaswant Thada is 50 INR per person. In order to step outside Jaswant Thada through the fence door to enter the Rao Jodha Desert Rock Park, each person needs to pay another 100 INR for entrance and 100 INR for guide. The guide is mandatory.

My mom was not happy about going into the desert park and searching for the view that made me came to Jodhpur. She thought the tickets were too expansive, especially since we could only spent 5 to 10 minutes in the desert park before we had to leave to the airport. She didn’t like the view neither (it was not the right time of the day, morning should be better), and the uphill climb was too much for her age... The only thing she liked was the wall on top of the mountain as you can see in the picture above. While I am reading this paragraph that I wrote a few days ago, I just realized she was getting sick at the moment (probably she caught the cold when having dinner with me at the roof restaurant the day before) and she wasn’t feeling well at the moment, that was why she was so grumpy at the moment J

The airport in Jodhpur gave us the worst waiting experience in our India trip. There were Air India, Jet Airways, and another cheap airline flew out from Jodhpur that afternoon. Both Jet Airways and the cheap airline were late and they occupied the small airport, which made our Air India airplane had no place to park, even though it had arrived Jodhpur on time. Inside the waiting room, it was a mess too. There was no sign nor broadcast. The boarding information was shouted by airport ground crews, but since the small waiting room had cumulated too many people, no one could hear them. I had to go to the gate door and ask the ground crews many times, so we would not miss our flight. We were delayed at the airport for about 2 hours.