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Published: January 23rd 2016
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H’s app was showing that the train to Ajmer was an hour late but we didn’t want to take the chance as the trains go very slow so we thought they might catch up a bit. We said goodbye to Sushma and Amer and the taxi whisked us through the chaos to the station where the board suggested the train was even later than when we left. In all we spent about 2 hours waiting for a train journey that was only going to take 2 hours! The train was more comfortable than the last one though and we arrived only about 1.5 hours late into Ajmer. We had a taxi arranged to take us from there to Pushkar, a sacred Hindu town set around a sacred lake, said to have been created by Brahma. The only Brahma temple in the country is in Pushkar.
We were staying in another converted mansion house with plants trailing over the balconies around the courtyard and we had a beautiful room with a pale blue dome in the centre through which light came. The bed wasn’t quite so comfortable but you can’t have everything!
We had a late lunch up on the
terrace then went for a wander around the town. The lake is surrounded by 52 ghats where pilgrims go to wash and pray. You have to find a way between the buildings to get to the lake and you should not walk onto the ghats with shoes on but it is quite hard to tell where shoes need to come off so we stayed back looking down onto the lake. The streets back from the lake are one huge market and the concentration of tourists is much higher than other places we’ve been as it’s only a small town. Being such an important place for Hindu pilgrims, it also seems to be a bit of a hippy drop out place and there seemed to be quite a few people around who had been there for some time. There are a number of places with a good reputation for learning yoga/meditation/musical instruments so some people clearly stay a while for that.
There are also temples everywhere to the many, many Hindu gods – we have barely started to understand the very basic beliefs of the Hindu religion so have not tried to understand the temples but some of them are
really beautiful.
The following day we set off to do the climb up to the temple of Savitri which is on a hill overlooking the town. It was quite a hike up steps which got gradually steeper. We kept passing and being passed by a group of 4 teenage boys who insisted on photos being take with us. Further up a family group coming down introduced themselves as being from Calcutta and then suddenly passed me the phone on which one of them was talking to his daughter and wanted me to talk to her – she appeared to be as bemused as I was!
Towards the top of the hill, there are a large number of langurs, a fairly common monkey around here. Many have just had babies which were just started to explore away from their mothers. The monkeys are quite disconcerting in their posture – they look straight at you while sitting with their knees bent up and hands around their knees, just like a person would. We had a quick look around the small temple at the top which doesn’t have very much to see but gives fantastic views across the desert one way
and across Pushkar the other.
Strangely they are currently building a cable car to take people to the temple at the top – the posts and cable cars are already in place and running but they are finishing the stations at top and bottom. As we went up and down we were passed by trains of donkeys carrying cement up the steps to the builders. The building work looked quite precarious and none of the workers had any protective clothing but I guess that’s not a surprise. It's not clear where people are going to go when they get to the top as there is not much space there – it seems like a very big investment into an area that couldn’t take many people.
We walked back into town and round to a cafe on the far side of the lake which had lovely lake views and watched the world go by for a while.
Pushkar is also famous for its annual camel fair which takes place in November and sounds like more Indian chaos with 30,000 animal so we had to have a go on a camel..... We decided a couple of hours was enough
(and we were right!) and were led out into the desert by Vikram, a rather sullen 18 year old who appeared to tactically drop into conversation various sob stories along the way including that he had never been to school, that he looked after his 5 younger sisters, his father was a drinker, that he only got paid £30 per month..... It was interesting to see some of the area heading out into the desert but the camels were not comfortable and we were glad that we had not decided to go for any longer!
Before we left the next day we had some time to kill so wandered in the market and I actually managed to do some shopping! That’s probably it for this trip though....
At 12pm the car came to take us back to the train station in Ajmer.....but I’ll leave that for next time.
Be good to hear from anyone that's out there reading?
S + H x
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Jenny Zigzag
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Camels and balloons in Pushkar
My Mum went there a couple of years ago to take part in the international hot air balloon festival at the same time as the camel fair: a very exciting time & like nothing she's experienced before or since! Before that the furthest she'd been was France but it certainly have her a real taste for adventure. Look forward to your next installment. Jen xxx