Pushkar and it's pushy priests

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Arriving far too early in the morning to Pushkar after a nonexistent sleep on the bus, we walked around the shit and fly infested alleyways in search of a hotel and found a little gem, Atithi’s Guesthouse run by the extremely chilled out Pappu. Pushkar is a small square lake with rows of sacred ghats surrounding the magical lake. One of the few Brahma temples in the world is here. Being too tired to sleep we went off to Babu’s cafe for breakfast then walked the streets where we became victims to the imfamous pushy priests of Pushkar. After some bartering and argument we significantly reduced our Brahman donation for our lakeside Brahman blessing. With the tiredness catching up to us we did some street market shopping and chilled out at the guesthouse for the rest of the day, making our crunchy munchy salad for dinner, as discovered at an Italian restaurant in Kumily.

The mid morning walk around the lake and up to the top of the nearby mountain Savitri temple was exasperated by the quickly rising temperatures but was worth the view at the top. Returning down the mountain we visited the ‘Just One Pinch’ chai guy and sampled his 12 spice chai mix. This young guy was a brahma priest who left the fold, and was extremely proud of his spices and tea, and teemed with joy as he showed us his comments book and stories of sending chai spices to friends in Australia. We got his details in case.
The ex-priest had told us about some genuine baba temple about 10km from the city where the potato babas have abstained from all temptations, so we hired a motorbike and went off in search of the temple. So this is what happened – we drove through mud, sand, over rocks, through villages that had probably never seen white people, and we never found the temple. I stalled the bike about 10 times and could never restart it, the kick start just wouldn’t work for me, we had to find an Indian to do it, at one point, in a small village we gathered quite a crowd as they wanted to start taking the bike apart to see why it wouldn’t start when all I wanted was someone to jump on it and kickstart it. Fortunately we made it back to town just before dark, as it was bandit territory. Dinner at Babus cafe where we refrained from the special choc balls (containing ganja) and arranged our tickets for an early morning bus to Johdpur.

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