Rajasthan Postmortem

[ Jaipur, Rajasthan ]

Happy post-Easter to all of you folks back in the West. I hope those who observe the day had a wonderful time with family and friends, and ate so much low-quality chocolate that you’ll spend the next day or so expelling hollow bunny ears from gun-shy backsides. And I mean that in a good way, really.

Here in India, Easter marked the final day of an unplanned 3.5 week odyssey through India’s exotic Far West state of Rajasthan. My circumnavigation of this pro- and e-vocative region began and ended in Jaipur, the state capital, home to just over three million. I rented a tiny 100cc Hero–the most common motorcycle in India–and proceeded to ride somewhere around 2500km.

My route (maybe at some point on Google Maps, but for now, you’re on your own):

Jaipur – Sikar – Nagaur – Jodhpur – Pokaran – Jaisalmer – Jalore – Udaipur – Pushkar – Jaipur

These resulted in a series of Facebook posts, with lots of pretty picture and some mini-stories:

• Arrival,
• Street Wedding,
• Finding a Steed,
• First Days on the Road,
• The Blue City,
• Udaipur Pre-Holi,
• Holi in the Temple,
• A Day in Pushkar, and finally
• Bob the Easter Camel

That journey is now at an end. It was amazing. Fantabulous. Incredible. Totes amazing. Pick your adjective (just not “epic”—after Mongolia, “epic” has been scaled up a bit!). I’m waiting for a late-night train to Gorakhpur, whence a bus, a border crossing, and another bus will bring me home to Pokhara. Time to decompress and sleep and sleep and decompress and hopefully write a bit (it’s a 21-hour train ride, and ten hours on the bus).

All in all an incredibly satisfying mini-adventure. A month well-spent.

***

Some of you may have noticed that alllllll this activity is on Facebook, with a few selected updates to my Instagram feed–one of my favorite things ever (if you aren’t already following it, please do). Meanwhile, my poor little website languors–often thought of, but never cultivated. This brings me to one final bit of behind-the-scenes news.

My problem with paying my site her full due–a problem as yet unresolved–is practical: how to easily create and upload a post containing a small set of photographs, with short comments for each, from either my mobile phone or laptop. For my public Facebook page, there are occasional gotchas, but it is essentially a simple process. (The downside is that I become Mark Zuckerberg’s digital sharecropper, and that’s a bad thing.)

When I set up my website a few years ago, my intention was to create written content primarily, with an occasional travel video, and a handful of photographs sprinkled throughout. I didn’t even own a camera.

Reality has taken a different path. 😉

So here I am, uploading images regularly to Facebook, building that audience to 14K+ (a good thing no matter what), and drawing lots of traffic into Mr. Zuckerberg’s Ginormous Empire rather than creating a nice little commune of my own. When I can grab a few hours here or there (surprisingly infrequently) I create a location-specific gallery for my site, re-upload all the images, re-comment all the images, and–in far-from-real time–re-post a link to the newly created content on Facebook. To no-one’s surprise, this is neither an effective use of my time, or a good strategy for spreading the Transglobalist word.

Rather than continually repeat this duplication of effort, I’ve been using my extra time to research available WordPress themes that provide the desired functionality, with a look that I can work with or easily customize as desired. There are many options, but with my usual non-access to bandwidth, it’s taking forever.

I believe I’ve finally narrowed it down to a couple of contenders, and will be focusing on this in the upcoming weeks once I’m back home in Pokhara.

All of that, I suppose, is just my way of staying: Please Stay Tuned.

Thanks for your patience and support. We’ll talk soon.

—Jim