Pushkar and Ajmer: the final sightseeing

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In the last push before returning to Delhi and a date with an international flight, we stopped off at Pushkar and Ajmer. Pushkar is a tiny town around a holy mountain lake; as such, it has tons of ghats (bathing points) and temples. Some of the temples are quite elaborate and cool, but nothing unlike others we've seen. We spent most of the last couple days wandering around, absorbing the atmosphere.

Just walking, we saw cows charging down packed streets with small boys flying out of the way; langur monkeys monkeys almost as tall as me (maybe an exaggeration; the damn things scare the bejesus out of me), tiny squirrels running along with us as we strolled mere inches from my head; "chicle" kids that entertained us enough with their stories and lies that we walked around town with them for the better part of a half hour, finally buying them a couple bags of chips; and more genuinely friendly villagers than we'd seen in the rest of India combined. Pushkar is accustomed to touristy visitors, as it's population swells annually from the year round number of 14,000 to more than 200,000 for a religious festival, but most of the visitors are non-white. This combination made us not so much an anomally to be stared at as in other parts of India (Rajasthan in particular), but more of an irregularity to say hello to and walk on. Pushkar was very pleasant, and quite quaint and pretty. Although the lake couldn't have been filthier.

Back in Ajmer (only 11km from Pushkar) we spent the morning before our train going to the "two and a half days" mosque, and the Nasiyan Jain temple. The mosque had an ugly enough facade that we decided not to bother taking our shoes off and going in, but the Jain temple was quite a different story. Large and pretty from the outside, with several obelisks, spires and decorative towers, the so-called red temple was inviting immediately. The only part open to the public was an enormous model of Jain mythology and "history", all done in brilliant gold hues. An enormous mountain'like structure at one end was balanced by an enormous palace-like structure, with highways and minor architecture crowding every inch of space in between. Hundreds of tiny people statues walked or rode elephant and camel statues, all thronging through the streets in a perpetual circular parade. Some signs told the story of the model in incomprehensible English, leaving the story being told quite elusive to our white minds, but the spectacle itself was easily worth the price of admission. This may be the final cool thing we see in our Indian odyssey, and as such, it a worthy representative of the beauty and mystery that has characterized almost everything else.

On to Delhi!

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