Monthly Archives: July 2009

The temple revellers were even more raucous last night with booming music starting up around < ?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" /?>
10 pm and continuing well into the early hours.   Surprisingly we are still able to get to sleep despite the din emanating a few feet from our window.  We originally planned to be in Pushkar for three nights, but have decided to stay another night which involves moving rooms, the upside of which is that we will be at the back of the hotel where it is much quieter and hopefully out of earshot of the nightly festivities.

I’m feeling very lethargic today and although the medication seems to be improving my dodgy stomach problem we don’t do very much in the morning.  We have lunch at a restaurant occupying a first floor terrace overlooking the main street – an ideal place for people-gazing and just generally watching the world go by.  A young sari-clad woman squats with a bundle of cow grass on a cloth in front of her, patiently waiting for customers.  Eventually she starts to attract custom from more well-to-do Indians wanting to enhance their karma.  For she is selling grass to feed to the cows;  and to buy for grass for the cows is to gain spiritual brownie points. Once a sale has been made she takes an arm-full of grass from the small mound and carries it to a group of cows that are gathered down a small side street.  As we watch business starts to pick up and soon she is soon doing a brisk trade.

There are plenty of places in Pushkar offering camel safaris into the desert, either on the back of a camel or in a camel cart, for anything from an hour to two or more days.  It’s even possible to travel from here to other parts of Rajasthan on extended camel treks of a week or more although I should imagine that’s not for the faint-hearted.  Having already braved the back of a camel in Mongolia we decide to try a two-hour camel cart ride.   Although, as it turns, which is the more uncomfortable is a close run thing – on balance probably the cart.  The desert around Pushkar is not the sea of dunes sort;  the countryside may be dry and sandy but it is still predominantly green and peanuts are grown.   There is some quarrying of sand for the railway line that is under construction and much of our route has been churned up by lorries and is rather reminiscent of a building site.  At one point a young boy trudges behind us for a while serenading us with a scratchy and out-of-tune rendition of Frere Jacques on a stringed instrument played with a bow.  We willingly give him some money knowing that he will stop playing as soon as we do.  Further on we take a break – for our benefit or the camel’s we’re not sure – and immediately we are joined, as if from nowhere, by two old men and a young boy.  The old men both have stringed instruments and bows with bells, the latter providing an added dimension to the music as they tinkle in time to the rhythm.  After they have performed their song and we have shown our appreciation in the time honoured fashion, we invited to try the instrument ourselves and I can confirm that even Andy can make a scratchy noise on it, but getting the bells to tinkle in time requires a bit more practice. 

We continue our bone-shaking ride over ruts, potholes and generally uneven ground, passed the nascent railway embankment and several makeshift gypsy encampments where people are living in flimsy shelters made from tarpaulins and bits and pieces of cardboard, sacking and the like.  Children run out to follow the cart asking for money or chocolate, but in a half-hearted sort of way not really expecting anything;  not as tenacious as some we have come across.  We stop briefly at a street-side mobile trolley for a cup of chai – coffee in Andy’s case – where men sit around on metal benches chewing the fat.  Tea is brewed very sweet, very strong and very milky and served in expresso-sized plastic cups which are simply tossed on the floor afterwards (littering is a way of life in India, no one thinks twice about it).

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The haveli may be in a small back street way from main part of town, but it is opposite a temple and we are beginning to realise that this has its drawbacks particularly at festival time.  Festivals in < ?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" /?>
India seem to get into full swing at night and we are woken in the early hours by deafeningly loud music, a commotion in the street and engines revving.  We find out later that groups of revellers make a circuit of the temples with portable loudspeakers blaring out music with a total disregard for anyone trying to sleep. Apparently there is a  law that prohibits noise after 10 at night but it’s rarely enforced.  Fortunately, tonight the racket is short-lived.

We spend some time researching accommodation for our next stop, Jodhpur and settle on the Singhvi Haveli which is able to accommodate us in their best suite – the Maharani – for 1400 rupees.  So we decide to splash out as it sounds as though it could be something quite special.  We shall be sorry to leave Pushkar, though;  it has been a pleasant and relaxing place to get away from the madness that seems to be India and enjoy a more unhurried pace and relative peace and quiet. 

I’m still not feeling particularly well so we revisit the medical centre and I get a thorough grilling and a physical examination by the doctor who pronounces that I have gastritis and prescribes three lots of medication:  a probiotic, anti-acid and a moss green pill which might be an antibiotic or could be something else.  The consultation and medication costs about the same as a single prescription back in the UK.  I’m now taking five pills a day:  2 vitamin B1s (to deter mosquitos although I’m not sure how effective they are), doxyclyline anti-malaria, a probiotic and and unidentified green tab.   Hopefully I shall start to feel better soon.

We meet Mr Sharma again at 4pm, this time for a guided tour of the town and it’s temples.  Mr Shrama is a Brahmin and therefore knows a thing or two about the Hindu gods and spends a large part of the walk recounting Ganesh came by his elephant head and the story of Brahma and how there came to be 52 ghats in Pushkar.  We visit a number of temples, some of which are private and don’t permit non-Hindus to enter so we can only peer through the gateway, others are tiny hole-in-the wall shrines, some, like Brahma`s temple are more substantial, but all are dilapidated, mildewed and in need of some TLC.  There is a Jain and a Sikh temple in Pushkar but our tour doesn`t include these unfortunately, probably because Mr Sharma is mainly concerned with the Hindu side of things. 

Mr Sharma explains that the government provided 46m rupees to fund a project to dredge the lake but the money ran out before the project could be finished, which explains why the bottom of the lake is currently two distinct levels.  Mr Sharma is clearly irritated by this state of affairs which he puts down to government corruption and the siphoning off of funds into politician’s and contractor’s pockets.  Even more incomprehensible in his view is why the government should have provided money to start a bridge building project in Pushkar rather than provide funds to complete the work on the lake which in his view is far more pressing.  Mr Sharma doesn’t appear to be very enamoured of Indian politics.

At the end of the tour we are invited into his home for a cup of delicious marsala chai and to meet his wife and daughter.  This educated family live in three rundown rooms on the ground floor of their rather unprepossessing guest house and the only furniture in their main living space is a bed and two plastic chairs.  The family recently acquired an attractively patterned tortoise which one of their sons found in the woods and decided to bring home and we are invited to hold it, stroke is and generally admire it.  Their two sons and daughter have all been to college but his sons are experience difficulty finding good jobs and his daughter can`t get a place on a teacher training course because of a quota system that reserves places for low caste Hindus with lower academic achievements.  Mr Sharma is particularly put out by this because he has invested all his available income in educating his children and one of his son`s achieved the highest mark in his exams and still can`t get a government job.  Meanwhile Mr Sharma is so hard up that he had been unable to replace his worn out shoes until we paid him for yesterday`s tour.  What a crazy world we live in.

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I’ve not been feeling well for the last few days with stomach discomfort, so today we go to the local medical centre, but there is no doctor in attendance, only the pharmacist.  I shall have to wait until tomorrow.  We take a stroll round the colourful bazaars – tiny shops with goods spilling out onto the street and sun-faded clothes fluttering in the breeze, endless crewelwork and mirrored bedcovers, wall hangings, cushion covers and carved wooden trays and other such items – many familiar from ethnic shops such as Karavan where they are sold at greatly inflated prices. 

As we pass an old Haveli opposite Seventh Heaven a man calls out to us from inside;  it turns out to be someone who pressed a card into our hand when we first arrived in < ?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" /?>
Ajmer in the hope of persuading us to book into his hotel when we got to Pushkar.  He wants us to come in to look at the rooms and to find out why we decided to stay somewhere else.   The rooms are huge, clean but spartan and with none of the character and charm of Seventh Heaven.  Unwittingly we find ourselves drawn into a conversation with his brother about how they might improve the appeal of the hotel and after making a few suggestions about furnishings and decor and the importance of being on the internet and getting independent reviews, being in Lonely Planet etc we say our goodbyes and leave feeling slightly bemused.

At 4pm we have arranged to have a guided walk in the countryside with Mr Sharma who lives just round the corner.  It’s been raining and so the streets are squelchy with a mixture of mud and cow dung – lovely!  Mr Sharma is a charming older gentleman with heavily accented and not very fluent English and his commentary is a little difficult to follow.  Even after two week in India we are still finding the Indian accent eludes us.  Within a few minutes we are out of the town and in the green and peaceful countryside, passing through a park and then up into the hills to visit a couple of small white-washed temples;  one to Shiva which has a permanent spring with a flow that never varies and a fabulous view over Pushkar and the other to Krishna with five natural pools and where a festival is in progress.  Along the way, we stop to feed the black-faced monkeys who are a bit wary at first but as soon as one plucks up the confidence to come forward then a whole horde of others appear as if from nowhere, rushing down the hillside and out of the trees to make sure they get their share – youngsters, large males, mothers with babies.  Two groups appear and once the food is finished what starts as a bit of minor squabbling quickly descends into fightin and Mr Sharma has to scare them off to avoid us getting caught in a full scale melee. 

On the way back to the hotel, Mr Sharma suggests we call in on the owner of the Seventh Heaven Inn who has recently moved in to a new house on the outskirts of Pushkar.  The house is enormous; built over several floors with balconies and terraces on each level and as we later discover, amazing views of Pushkar and the surrounding area from the roof.  Anoop lives here with his heavily pregnant French wife, Jan, and their two-year-old daughter.  We are welcomed with tea and coffee as if it were the most natural thing in the world for Mr Sharma to turn up unannounced with two foreign tourists in tow.  Anoop has spent several years in London living in Camberwell and St Johns Wood and we chat for a while about various parts of London, the renovation of the hotel and his plans for taking paying guests in his new house as well as the danger of kidnapping in Agra which come as a surprise to us.  We are taken up to the roof to admire the view and I’m sure we would have had a guided tour of the whole house if he hadn’t a meeting to get to at the hotel. 

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