Rajasthan state contains most of India's western Thar Desert near Pakistan. Although a desert, it's hardly as wild as the Sahara or the Gobi and contains many significant cities, irrigated farmland, and nowadays roads and industries. It nevertheless makes up a fairly significant chunk of India and the drive from Delhi to Bikaner took a full day on so-so two lane roads and that from Bikaner to Jaiselmer most of the next. The Thar is fairly moist as deserts go, so the landscape is more one of scrubby grassland and thorny shrubs that allow for grazing than barren rock and sand of those of more extreme aridity. The straight highways of the Thar are also home to what must be India's most suicidal cows; I wore my seatbelt the whole way because of frequent slams of Sura's Breaks to avoid cows with a death wish.

Bikaner is like a city out of 1001 Arabian nights, with a massive central fort, narrow crowded streets, and more camels used as beasts of burden than I've seen anywhere else in my travels . We stayed at a pleasant inn on the city's outskirts but spent little time in the city itself.

Our primary destination in the area instead was Karni Mata Temple in nearby Deshnok, better known as "The Rat Temple", one of India's weirder religious attractions. The Hindu temple is dedicated to a fourteenth-century female saint of the same name who performed many miracles including raising her drowned son from the dead. She decreed that members of her family would no longer die but would be reincarnated as rats....and a large part of the current population of the town still believes the multitude of rats (something like 20,000) that inhabit the temple are reincarnations of their ancestors. So temple ceremonies involve not only elements of worship but also feeding the rats. Wow, now that was cool!

Our visit to the Rat Temple and drive onwards to Jaiselmer took place on Christmas Day, so we planned for a big celebration dinner when we arrived. Members of the group chipped in to buy Tim a Santa suit. He was a good sport about it and drove the truck all day wearing it....and made the perfect bad Santa. Between exchange of Secret Santa gifts and lots of booze, it turned out to be a quite rowdy night, once which I uncharacteristically left long before the revelry ended. Photos of my own drunkenness posted earlier to Facebook are from New Years Eve rather than our Christmas Party. Nevertheless, it was a fun day and night and one I didn't regret too much the next morning.