Jaipur to Pushkar

We spent a mostly lazy last day in Jaipur sorting out the remainder of our time in India - about 12 days around Rajasthan and two in Mumbai. A bit wary after our experience in Agra, we spent time researching busses and trains to our various destination and realized more and more that if we were to stick to our normal independent traveler mode, we would find ourselves again and again subject to our complete lack of local knowledge and the whims of commission hungry taxi drivers and others who see us as big walking dollar (rupee) signs. We crunched some numbers and decided, as has been suggested to us by many people, to hire a car for our Rajasthan trip. It might have caused some small injury to my anti-tourist traveller identity, but in the end I think we're saving ourselves from a long string of logistical headaches. Our gracious host for the past few days, Preeti, not only arranged our car and driver (the very friendly Nandhu with his rather comfortable car - complete with a black shag-carpet back seat cover), she helped us book very well priced rooms in places she trusts in the various cities we're visiting: Pushkar, Bikaner, Jaisalmer, Jodhpur, and Udaipur. Turns out hospitality runs in her family and we'll be put up by her sister in Bikaner and her brother in Udaipur. Satisfied that we had set ourselves up for a minimum-stress remainder of our time in India, we grabbed an auto-rickshaw and made the trip across town to the so-called Monkey Temple. While we've seen our share of primates on this trip so far, it was hard to resist a visit to a temple that promised to be overpopulated with them. Before we were 100 feet from the base of the windy path that led up to the hillside temple, we knew this place would live up to its name. It was simply crawling with macaques (and goats, dogs, pigs, and cows). While Macaques rank pretty firmly in the lower echelons of my monkey-favoritism rankings (they're pretty aggressive and only moderately cute), seeing them in this setting and concentration was fun.

But what really made the trip was a particular confluence of cuteness that was made all the more amusing due to a particular youtube video (see here) that became a Strathmann family favorite after my brother Luke's introduction.

Nature's cutest symbiotic relationship

The temple provided a lovely late afternoon view of the city we've enjoyed for the past few days. We made our way back down the hill through the droves of wildlife and took an auto back to the guesthouse for a lovely vegetarian thali dinner prepared by Preeti and her continually chuckling, kind natured mother, which we shared with a fellow guest from the Netherlands. The next morning we enjoyed a breakfast of muesli (of a quality that has been hard to find outside of Europe) and toast before saying our goodbyes to our lovely hostess (and her just as lovely parents) and settled into the furry back seat of Nandhu's car for the few hours towards Pushkar. It's been fun to learn that despite the length of our trip and the huge diversity of locations we've visited that it's still exciting to set out into new scenery. Our surroundings became increasingly shrubby and desertlike and camel sightings went from sporadic to commonplace, to just about constant. After a short few hundred kilometers we arrived at the hotel Preeti had booked us, to be greeted by another exceedingly friendly and welcoming host along with a clean, comfortable and extremely well priced room.

 We settled in and then headed down to the well known local market, which, more than anything is a tourist attraction (for indians and foreigners alike). Thousands of scarfs, cheap decorative knives, camel-leather bags, and various tourist-priced souvenirs lined the seemingly endless narrow street the wound along the Pushkar lake, which itself has been the historical point of attraction as a pilgramage site.

A particularly classy looking Enfield

Dad, I'm sorry but I resisted the urge to buy you these shoes.

Tucked among the myriad shops are just as numerous (okay, just 52, but it's a small lake) Ghats, or sacred bathing points which are named after various spiritual and historical figures (including Gandhi, for the Ghat at which some of his ashes were scattered). Sporting our well practiced smiles of polite denial and handing out happy "no thanks" to the constant solicitations, we made our way to the far end of the market that is home to the Brahma temple that in additional to being apparently one of only a few Brahma temples in the world, has an interesting origin story.

The concentration of stands outside the temple asking a bit too aggressively for small fees to hold shoes (this is normally complimentary) detracted a bit from the visit, but the temple proved to be interesting, albeit less grand than its fame might have invoked in my mind. We made our way back through the market, realizing more and more that Pushkar seems to be a hippy mecca, with its abundance of cheap colorful clothing, vegetarian food (no meat/eggs/alcohol in the entire town), and the availability of "special" bhang lassis (a green sludgy drink that is made with some cheap form of hashish). Add a few more drum circles and subtract the camels (but not the smells) and it might as well be the parking lot before a Phish concert (bad joke). After some less than committed window shopping, we made our way back to the hotel and retired early after an O-kay dinner of potato and spinach curry and a few odd samosas at the quiet, atmospheric rooftop restaurant.