Pushkar

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Today we're in Pushkar which is a town full of temples. The town is situated around a lake which has ghats for holy bathing. Alcohol, meat and eggs are not allowed in the town, but we did see our hotel getting rid of some contraband beer bottles! The town is full of western hippies staying long term, so it feels more westernised than the rest of Rajasthan.

We have only seen inside one temple so far but we had to pick the hardest one becuse it was situated on top of a huge hill. It took us about an hour to climb up in the hot sun but the views of the town were definately worth it. The temple itself was quite plain and small but was a nice place to rest after the climb. While we were sitting outside having a rest there was a massive clattering and a pair of donkeys came charging down the steps in a position that should best be used in private! Needless to say we got out of the way sharpish. There were also two skinny puppies who followed us around for a while because we fed them some biscuits.

The major difference between here and the other places we have visited is that people say namaste rather than hello.

When we eventually left the hotel to go for some tea and to see the lake at sunset, Trav was accosted by a barber looking for customers and got talked into having a shave. This was quite scary with the cut-throat razor and all and then the guy started giving him a face massage etc. The price was "as you like" which means whatever you think it's worth which is hard to judge when we don't have any background info...

We found some steps where lots of non-Indians were sitting to watch the lake. We had thought there might be lots of people going to bathe at the ghats but there was no one. We were accosted by a pushy "priest" who was trying to give us flowers to float in the lake for an initially low sum - it was bound to increase though and no one else was doing it. Apparently if he gave us the good luck band we could take photos in all the temples which sounds highly unlikely! There were also several people trying to sell Trav drugs and one persistant fellow just wouldn't take no for an answer. After the usual "hashish, hash, something to smoke?" he continued to say that T looked like a druggie because of the black circles under his eyes (caused by lack of sleep). He then seemed to list every slang name for cannabis under the sun just in case T hadn't grasped what he was saying. The price was apparently Rs 500 for 10g...

We finally had tea in a nice garden restaurant and had pizzas which were the nicest non-Indian dishes we've had in India.

The next day we visited a Brahma temple. Its one of only a few in the world and so it was quite busy with Hindus on a pilgrimage.

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Photos

Temple Tower
This tower seemed to have permenant chanting coming from loudspeakers which kept waking us up...