Postcard from... Jodhpur

“Shall I tell you the best thing about Jodhpur? It's not the old walled city and its picturesque markets and blissfully defecating cows. It's not even the Fort of the Maharajas, with its huge pink barrels of stone soaring above the acropolis. It's the zip wire.”

Boris Johnson is apparently the most famous of Jodhpur's Flying Fox customers as his review was chosen to be the quote on its leaflets found at hotel desks. The leaflet doesn't mention whether he was more successful in Jodhpur than he was when he tried it during London's Olympics, when he got stuck in the middle.

Whether the zip wire is better than Rajasthan's "blue city" – many of Jodhpur's houses are painted in blue – and majestic Mehrangarh Fort is questionable, but what's sure is that it does offer a stunning view of them.

The Mayor of London also suggested the Flying Fox might provide a flying alternative to the "99 per cent of Indians [who] have never been on a plane", especially now that it's available in five locations in the country. But at £20 a go and with the national average income being just about £1 a day, I very much doubt that this is what the two British entrepreneurs who brought the Flying Fox to India in 2009 had in mind.