After the unsuccessful third game drive, I visited the Rathambhore Fort,
which turned out to be one of the highlights of my trip. It is a huge
complex, 7 km in circumference, mostly in ruins. There are a number of
temples on top, one of which, the Ganesh Temple, is quite popular and
attracts quite a crowd of Indians as well as hundreds of monkeys. I was the
only foreigner at the fort, which is a loss for all of them, but a gain for
me. The people were very friendly and very photogenic.
While I was walking around a group of 4 Indians invited me to join them on
their walk to the Gupta Ganja, a fresh water spring on the other side of
the fort. They were from a village about 40 km away. It is a bit
interesting how touchy-feely Indian men are with each other...walking
around holding hands, sitting in cudly groups etc. Back from the well, I
managed to talk them out of taking me for lunch, as I've been avoiding non
-hotel restaurant food for the most part. They settled on buying me a
pepsi, then they took me to see the swami. I sat for a bit and watched the
swami swamiing, which consists of sitting with legs crossed with both feet
on top of knees, talking incompreshsibly, sprinking holy water type stuff
and tossing rice. I stuck around for 10 minutes or so before excusing
myself to continue checking out the fort.

After another photo session with the locals outside the swami's tent
flocked to get it done. Two more Indians adopted me and brought me to a
different temple where the guru gave me a red dot on the forehead, tossed
some rice over me, and tied a string around my right wrist. I'm not quite
sure which god that was all for, but it was an experience. It did
seem that having the red dot (which everyone at the fort had already
gotten) made people even friendlier to me. As it was getting close to train
time, I cut the visit short after about 3 hours and went back to the
parking lot where the jeep from the hotel was waiting for me.

Unfortunately, when I got to the station, I found out that my train to Agra
was seriously delayed. To pass my 8 hour delay I returned to my hotel and
sat around the campfire. A large group of 42 British cyclists had just
about the whole hotel booked out. They were on a 6 day bike trip from
Agra to Jaipur. It turns out that had I gone on the afternoon drive, I
would have gotten my tiger, but I'd say I had a better time at the fort. At
least since I still need to get a tiger, I'll have an excuse to return.