Pushkar!
Certainly the first place in India I felt relaxed, and able to enjoy myself. I think spending a few days in Delhi, as my first India experience, might have been a bad idea. Sort of got me off on the wrong foot. First impressions matter. But after 5 or 6 cities, a whole bunch of memorable things (Taj Mahal, 500 year old forts, cooking class, etc) and lots of bus and train rides later I can say India is a great place to travel.
Pushkar is a tiny town, with a holy lake. It's surrounded by big, rocky hills, that can be climbed to view the desert landscape. In April, it's smoking hot here! Almost 40 degrees, and it's just the beginning of summer.
There's a strong backpackers community in Pushkar. Lots of 'hippies', travelers, backpackers, and tourists alike. Not sure what the difference is between all those terms or where I fit really. But everyone's here, relaxing. There's less tourist attractions here than other cities... no city palace or fort or anything. And yet everyone comes here! It's a hangout spot because it has great weather, friendly locals... it's cheap and spiritual. Lots of foreigners with heena tattos, red dots between their eyebrows and head jewelry. It's a cool place. We stayed for 4 days, which would put us more toward fast traveling, rather than slow travelling. We met some people who stayed for 2 days, we met some people who stayed for months.
Right off the top we went to see sunrise at Pushkar Lake. People chanting, people praying, people dunking themselves in the holy lake water to cleanse their sins and karma. With the sun coming over the surrounding hills it was a pretty beautiful sight. We captured a great timelapse for our vlog. (Please check out our youtube channel ! ! ! ! !) I tried to meditate for 2 hours as the timelapse ran... meditation is not exactly my thing. At least I sat relatively still for a couple hours.
Here's some pictures of the sunrise and the lake:
A bunch of people praying and chanting as the sun comes over the lake and birds fly across the sky. Pretty great way to start a day.
Wandering the streets of Pushkar is pretty great. The bigger the city in India, the more people are going to hassle you as you walk around. Pushkar is tiny, but still has lots of action. All the sights and sounds of India are there, just at a pace that I could manage a lot better. Cows (clean cows!) meandering the streets, traditional dressed women, delicious food being prepared, colourful homemade goods for sale. Wow! The beautiful chaos is still present, but it's a more organized chaos. Really great.
There's something comforting about being near animals, especially big animals. I've been around elephants twice now -- always extremely memorable. There's no elephants in Pushkar, but some of the cows are clean and really majestic looking. Monkeys climb the trees and along the rooftops. We even saw some camels, being used for camel rides. We didn't ride them because they didn't look to be the best treated camels in the world, but man I didn't realize how big a camel was. I thought it was comparable to a horse for some reason. Definitely not. Maybe moreso comparable to a giraffe. Massive neck, two joints in it's poweful back leg, and an incredible gutteral noise that comes out of it's mouth and throat. Really awesome. Here are some of my favourite animal pictures. I really had to pick and choose here-- I have dozens of pictures and videos of cows. There's something about being near big animals!
We got a really great slow-motion video of one of the camels chewing. Pretty funny.
I was nervous about the food in Pushkar. The whole town is vegetarian. Hindus are vegetarian and Pushkar really is a holy city. There's some pretty yummy vegetarian dishes though. We found one we really liked called Thali. To be fair, we had Thali many times before Pushkar, but we found it to be more delicious in Pushkar. It's a bunch of small bowls of food served with rice and bread. Inside the bowls could be curries, gravies, fruits, yoghurt, anything really. Every restaurant does Thali their own way. It looks like this:
You rip the bread with your hands, into a small, mouthful sized piece. Then load up whatever you want on top and let er rip. It's a fun way to eat, good for sharing and talking. Yum.
Another great thing we did in Pushkar was to climb one of the hills to see Savitri Temple at sunset. The temple isn't anything too special, but the sunset was just great. We met a bunch of travelers up there, one guy was playing guitar. We all joked around and watch the sun come down. We captured another timelapse. It was a great time and really one of the highlights of Pushkar. Behind us, you could see all over Pushkar, a bunch of concrete and brick buildings with no open windows (no glass), scattered around the lake. And in front of us, a sprawling desert landscape with some small hills and valleys as the sun went down behind the horizon. Awesome.
Here's a picture overlooking Pushkar, from the hike on the way up:
And here's that fabulous sunset:
Thanks for reading everyone! Luckily we found a restaurant with good internet for us to upload pictures. Who knows when we will find good internet again! Also, for some reason we still can't REALLY upload photos. We can only upload stills from our videos. I think maybe our photos are too large a file size. Anyway, we made it work. Hopefully we'll be back with more pictures soon!!
This featured blog entry was written by JetlagWarriors from the blog Traveller's Journal -- First LONG Trip!.
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