Pushkar

Pushkar

Hello all. First thing – our phone should be fixed by this afternoon, so I will try to call tomorrow.

Second – I have posted two blogs simultaneously, so don’t read this one first. Move down to the previous one and start there!

As I think we mentioned, we arrived in Pushkar around mid-afternoon and enjoyed vegetable burgers. Pushkar is considered by Hindus to be a holy city. It is the site of the only Brahman temple (apparently distinct from the caste – Brahmins) in India. The story behind this is that Brahma (who is considered to be the god of creation, as opposed to the operator (Vishnu) and the destroyer (Shiva)) wanted to perform some ritual down at the lake (which is said to have formed when Brahma threw a lotus flower on the earth and it landed in Puskar) but his wife would not come. Undeterred, Brahma performed the ritual with another woman, tantamount to marrying her. Suitably perturbed, his original wife cursed Brahma from a hill and decreed that he would be worshipped in no other town than Pushkar. Thus, Pushkar is a holy place.

Westerners seem to have difficulty interpreting ‘holy’. As with Dharamashala, we seem to think it means ‘place to get stoned’. Marajuana use here is apparently rife, as are dreadlocked and dusty hippies.

And as with the rest of India, there is always a scam lurking around the corner. A number of Hindu priests perform a ritual on the ghats for those who wish to have it done (as there are a very large number of Hindu pilgrims that come here specifically for this purpose). But for every one of these priests there are many scam priests who performed a hackneyed version for unwary toursist and charge exorbitant prices for the privilege. A couple of guys from the group almost fell prey to this one.
Additionally, Pushkar is the hang-out of ‘sadus’, naked holy men that have renounced material possessions, spend most of the year in the Himalayas living off nothing before making various pilgrimages to holy cities in India, one of them being Pushkar. Again, however, for every one of these individual there are numerous imposters who wander the streets asking tourists for money.

For reasons mentioned earlier the lake is considered by Hindu’s to be holy. They pray on its shores for health, wealth and relationships. However, at the moment, there is no water on the lake – just a dusty, dirty hole and some backhoes in the middle. The government has drained the entire body of water because of the repugnant pollution that had festered in the lake for decades. One hundred and fifty thousand fish died within some short period of time and the stench was driving people away. When the government drained the river they took another 150,000 fish with them. Unbelievably, the government then sold these fish onto anyone willing to pay for them. Who knows what was in those fish.

Pushkar is a fairly typical, and small, town in the Rajasthani desert. Its dry, hot, replete with clothes stalls, rubbish and cows eating the rubbish - but with a few quirks. Emaciated, half-naked men carrying beads and a vessel for water and food stroll the streets, around an innocuous corner a naked man squats under a holy tree, westerners ‘discovering themselves’ drive around on motorbikes with Hare Krishna Haricuts and bindis on their heads, and pilgrims from all over India frequent the various temples in the city. Alcohol, drugs, meat, eggs and leaving your shoes within 40 feet of the Ghats are all theoretically banned.

On the evening we arrived, we took an orientation walk around the city. We visited the outsides of various temples – Sikh, Hindu, Brahman, Western (there is only one ATM in town, often with no money and a long line of pilgrims). We ended up having dinner back at the hotel and watched our second bollywood movie – an epic about a marriage of alliance between a Mughal king in Agra and a Rajput princess in Amer. I actually didn’t mind it. As is par for the course, it was horrendously cheesy, but there was some bread under it. The movie is over 4 hours long, so we await the final thrilling instalment tonight.

I woke at 4:45am the next morning (Kate chose to sleep in) for a bike ride and walk to a temple on top of a small mountain just outside Pushkar for views of the sunrise. So we rode through dark, shuttered streets, past the half-naked men sleeping outside a temple to a cafe where we dropped our bikes and made the steep climb up the mountain. It was a hard walk, nearly vertical towards the top and given my waning fitness a good morning workout. The sunrise was obscured by some clouds, but the views of waking Pushkar were expansive. We were also entertained/scared by a throng of lungi monkeys intent on baring their teeth and stealing what they could. I also had the largest glass of chai thus far.

We then had breakfast at a restaurant called ‘Honey and spice’ which had nice coffee and the best muesli I have yet tasted. There was no milk, just the thin, Indian yoghurt, dried figs, bananas, papyaya, apple, cashews, almonds, pomegranate, corn flakes and various other adornments. Actually I don’t think there was any Muesli in the muesli.

Upon returning to the hotel I discovered that I had managed to lock Kate in the room (in my drowsy efforts to make sure people would not walk in while she was asleep). She was not happy, but studiously working on improving the last blog entry.
We decided to go and re-do the mornings journey. So we jumped on the bikes again, returned to the cafe for some more coffee and muesli, and ascended the hill. It was much hotter and far more difficult – even the monkeys were sleeping in the shade. A number of more elderly pilgrims seemed to be having no such difficulty. We enjoyed the views and made our way back down. On our way we got briefly taking with some people who had come all the way from Kolkata to visit the temple (the temple itself is very small, just one room really).

I had my first encounter with a scam. On our way to the hill, some guy in a handicrafts store threw a cane basket in my path, which I, of course, ran over (although only a tiny part of it). He demanded money for the basket in course. We just rode off. But I thought this was a fairly enterprising scam – it wasn’t in the guidebook anyway!

Kate did some shopping while I minded the bikes and got talking with a very young man (10) called Vijay who crawled all over the bikes (and tried to crawl all over me). Exhausted and hot, we spent the remained of the afternoon beside the pool, and I had a quick nap.

Pushkar, despite all its peculiarities and weirdness, and a dry lake, is still very beautiful. The plains and small, peaky mountains that rise around it, are a perfect frame for this quaint, light-blue painted town.
Our love to you all.
Kate and Charles.