We arrived in Pushkar after a relatively short train journey - but a relatively long two and a half hour delay from 5.30am! - from Jaipur. There is no train station here so we took the train to Ajmer then a 30 minute bus ride through the mountains to Pushkar.
Pushkar is a very holy place with 400 temples. Every Hindu must visit Pushkar in his lifetime to be blessed by a priest in the lake and visit the only Brahma temple in the world. If they don’t make it in their lifetime, a family member must bring their ashes here. The lake is currently dried up as there was no monsoon here this year making it the worst and driest it’s been for 80 years. Agriculture has really suffered apparently.
This quiet, calm town hosts a mixture of tourists and pilgrims and every building seems to be either a hotel or guest house above a market stall selling anything from hippy-style clothing to didgeridoos to home-made incense! In October/November comes the annual ‘Camel Mela’ where thousands come to see camel trading and racing. During the week of the fair, the guest houses are fully booked and their prices shoot up. For the rest of the year, there is fierce competition as there is way more supply than demand and it was not a pleasant experience to arrive at the train station in Ajmer - we were hounded immediately by tens of men trying to take us to their hotel, throwing business cards at us and just shouting, shouting, shouting in an attempt to get their amazing 150 rupee deal heard. We prefer to just walk through all this and try to think calm thoughts, shut out their loud demands while we find our way to a rickshaw driver who will take us to where WE want to go. Which in this case was the bus station for our transport to Pushkar. Even on the bus we were surrounded by men giving us their card and demanding that we go to their hotel. It really starts to get to you and when leaving your hotel for the day you have to hold your breath and just brace yourself for the constant mither and hassle; there’s a real sense of desperation in this part of India and we’re sure it stems from poverty, even though some of the prices we hear are ludicrous and stem from nothing but human greed.
After much searching (while I sat with the bags in a restaurant), Chris and Mehdi, our new Tunisian friend from the train, finally found the perfect hotel: The Milkman. I would recommend this guest house to anyone coming to Pushkar - you certainly get the sense that this is a happy family home than a hotel; it is set back down a residential alley. The family and their brand new puppies live downstairs and have turned the rest of their four storey home into beautifully painted guestrooms of all shapes, sizes and prices. It really is quite quirky. There’s a great ‘restaurant’ on the third floor, where a family member cooks whatever you want from the menu in the little kitchen, and there are two additional terraces on the fourth and fifth floor. You have to dodge the cows, donkeys and sometimes camels in the alley when you leave!
Speaking of camels… Chris and I, along with Mehdi, went on an early morning camel ride into the desert yesterday! Wow - stupidly I didn’t realise it would be so high up and was scared for my life for the first half hour, thinking that the camel was going to fall over or something! Seriously, my camel was the itchiest camel in the world and every two seconds would lift one of it’s legs up to its head and have a little itch or bat a fly off while I hung on for dear life! Chris’ was far better behaved. It was great to be trekking through the dessert as the sun rose behind us, casting some cool camel shadows on the ground far FAR below! What was even more wonderful was to see very small communities wakening and preparing for the hot day ahead.
One thing I’ve loved about staying here is the little community we have in our guesthouse. There is Mehdi the Tunisian who, after meeting at the train station came for lunch with us before going with Chris to find the accommodation. The three of us decided to climb a mountain (!!) on our first evening up to one of the 400 Hindu temples in time for the sunset over the town. Here we met Will, a Kiwi also staying at The Milkman, who I then went to yoga with this morning.
Wow - the yoga was fab! I learned a new position: clown pose. This is kind of like a head stand but with your legs bent and resting on your elbows - very weird! Then I had to try a headstand, something that I haven‘t even thought about attempting for years and… it‘s still there, people! I can just about still do a headstand! Proud. The walk to the yoga place itself was wonderful. It’s about a 25 minute walk from The Milkman and in this small town where there are no cars and everyone goes around on foot, this took us slightly out of town. We walked past camels, huge herds of goats, children on their way to school in their neat uniforms, through cauliflower fields until we finally reached the yoga house. The Yogi took us up to his shaded roof terrace where the breeze cooled us as we looked out onto the mountains while doing yoga. Bliss.
Later today we will take a train to Udaipur, five and a half hours further south in Rajasthan. We’re quite sad to be leaving such a peaceful and holy town (minus all the hassle from the competing hoteliers and restaurant owners) and have realised that we’re being far too greedy with wanting to see so many places on our trip. Rather than staying a while in a place and getting to know it better, we are rushing through Rajasthan staying for only two nights in each town. We have learned our lesson and when we venture further south in October we aim to spend at least four nights in a place if not a week at a time.
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