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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