Bikaner... too hot.

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After a day of travel we arrived to Bikaner at 4pm, we discovered there was a strong tuk tuk walla gangster operation going on here that had to be skewing the statistics on the tripadvisor accommodation reviews, as we visited 3 guesthouses that were shit, before demanding to go to the one we had originally asked for Vinayak Guesthouse.
The family run guesthouse was typical in india, with the retired parents always around doing the modest things they enjoyed during the day, whilst the eldest son ran the errands of the house and guesthouse. We hid in the shade from the searing heating and ate thali and drank chai, accompanied by another guest Banwari.
Banwari was an poster-boy for veganism, seriously, he was mid 70’s in age but didn’t look a day over 50. He originally sprouted from a village near Bikaner and was a Bishnoi, who don’t eat anything living/ or soon to be living, so no meat of any king or eggs. Now retired in Ventura, California, he had emigrated in his 30’s to further his trade in civil engineering, and must have been quite successful as his children were each at Harvard and MIT.
Seeing the energy of the older generation in India, and meeting people like the ‘Professor’ in Udaipur, and Banwari here made me think there is definitely something here linking vegetarianism and a long youthful life. I slept on that thought.

Up in the morning with the intention of seeing Bikaner we ventured into town to take a look around, it was now we couldn’t understand why my sister have picked the place as one of her favourites during her visit. The place was a dirty dustbowl, and being low season we were probably the only foreigners and all eyes were on us. With this in mind we booked our night bus out of her for the following day. But the evening proved better, our hosts had invited us to their cousins marriage. The wedding is spread over 5 days, and this was the 3rd day which included a celebration in the evening, dinner for everyone, and a exchanging of dowry. After a mad traffic jam, caused by some poor town planning building the town across multiple major railway lines, we made it to the wedding in time to see the groom arrive in full regalia on his white horse, music was playing, and the young Indian men were dancing together with mardegra like energy. Taking our seats sheepishly, hordes of children stood around us saying hello and testing their English, there was a constant flow of pineapple lassi and something that looked like coke but wasn’t (my mind again worrying what parasites laying within the confines of the cup). After feeling like circus freaks and feeling embarrassed that we seemed to be getting more attention that the bride and groom on their pedestal, we went and greeted them and had a photo. After enjoying a meal, we said our goodbyes and were off back to the guesthouse to digest what we had just experienced.

The day began by joining another guest to make the journey to Deshnok to see the Karni Mata Temple – Rat Temple, where it is said that all it’s followers are reincarnated as rats, and there are loads of the filthy critters. We arrived in the heat of the day which kept the rat numbers down as they hid in the depths of the temple, just the fat, lazy, dead and diseased ones remained to capture our tourist imagination. Never saw the auspicious white rat though.
After returning to the guesthouse we relaxed for a while before collecting our luggage and jumping into our tuk tuk. We were on-route to our night-bus with a stop at the Bikaner Camel Research Centre on the way. At the camel centre we saw a fast camel, a strong camel, a dark camel, a mixed camel, a camel with max factor 10 eye brows, one for all tastes. Our tastes were satisfied by the flavoured camel milk and ice cream. Our main reason for visiting Bikaner was to do a camel safari, but due to the heat it seemed pointless so this was as close as we were going to get. “Tuk tuk driver, to the nightbus pronto”, another stinking hot nightbus... bring on Amritsar.

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