Pushkar, Rajasthan

January 28, 2019

Pushkar, Rajasthan

Pushkar

Pushkar Lake, overlooking Pushkar

Pushkar is one of the most spiritual places in all of India. It is an important pilgrimage site for Hindus and visited by thousands every year. It is so spiritual that it is illegal to drink alcohol, eat meat or eggs. It was a match made in heaven for us because it meant we could eat anything we wanted on any menu. What a dream.

Gurudwara Sahib

To get to Pushkar it was a train ride from Jaipur to Ajmer and a bus ride from there to Pushkar. Unfortunately we couldn't buy our train tickets as it was fully booked, so instead we were on a waiting list. It was busy not only because of the number of people in India (1.3 billion) but it was also a long weekend in Rajasthan for the kite festival. Thankfully we managed to get a ticket in the end. Whilst we were waiting for our train (after a one and a half hour delay, which really isn't too bad, as trains frequently get cancelled) we met one of the nicest Indian women who was my age. We spent the hour waiting, in conversation with her talking about everything from work to religion.

There are no rules when painting buildings in India, and why should there be?! Pink for the win.

The train ride was pleasant as the carriage was actually pretty empty (figure that one out). When we got to Ajmer the bus station is about 2 kilometres from the train station. However we were told that you could easily catch a bus from in front of the train station to get to Pushkar. This information was wrong! Instead of easily catching a tuk tuk to the train station which would have cost us a couple of dollars and been really straight forward, we tried doing it our way. Spoiler alert, when you are new to a country this rarely works.

We managed to get to a lake (when we asked to go to the bus station) via a public tuk tuk. All crammed in, there were the two of us and our luggage, eleven other people, plus a baby all in a vehicle no larger than a hatch back car. When they told us to get out (and we some how managed to do so even though we were the furthest from the door) there was no bus station to be found. So now we were in the middle of no where (well we thought so) until we saw a group of teenage girls who looked like they were waiting around to catch a bus (what that looks like, I don't know). But I asked them anyway “do you speak english” where they proceeded to reply with “no”. I then asked if they were catching a bus to Pushkar, where they said “yes”. Fantastic! Now all we had to do was stalk some teenage girls and we would arrive at our destination. Which worked a charm.

One of the many beautiful old buildings around Pushkar

We stayed at Hotel Everest. which like all accomodation in Pushkar, the location is wrong on all maps (booking.com, google maps, and maps me). This was not a problem because I have never seen a hotel so well marked out with sign posts on the streets. Pushkar is a small town that is set around a sacred lake. It is such a nice place and is known to travellers as a town where you plan on spending a couple of nights and end up staying there for months. For us, I mean we enjoyed it but we definitely didn't feel that way. Probably due to the fact that for foreigners the lake isn't swimmable and it's thousands of kilometres from a beach.

Post meditation feels. Enjoying watching all the fish in the lake, how they live in there I really don't know.

Pushkar has great food and heaps of shops with anything from beautiful silver jewellery, saris, hemp bags, musical instruments, hand made diaries and heaps more. This is where we first realised that we are on the last legs of our trip and we can finally buy some stuff as we wont have to lug it around for too long until we get back to Australia.. this revelation was dangerous.

Had to stop Luke from buying the whole shop, or maybe that was me..

Me nice and zenned out, walking back from our ayurvedic massage.

We enjoyed our second wedding anniversary in Pushkar. To celebrate we splurged and got an ayurvedic massage. It was heaven. Especially since the day before I really hurt my back. Turns out the advice I tell my clients but don't listen to myself about slowly easing into exercise after having a period off is actually sound advice. I will take note to listen to myself in the future. Whilst I was feeling sorry for myself Luke went on a hike with Andreas. Who is someone that we met in Agra and happened to see again in Pushkar (which was a lovely surprise).

Where Luke hiked up. Also all the dots in the sky are kites

Monkeys at the top of the hill on Lukes hike

All over Rajasthan (the state we were in) it was a long weekend for the kite festival. Everyone was up on their roofs flying kites which was a sight to behold. When we were on the roof of our accomodation having breakfast. An Indian man and a group of others were flying a kite and kept getting us to have a turn.

Which basically went like this:

They would get it high in the sky,
We would have about 5 seconds feeling the success of flying a kite,
It would plummet to the ground,
They would then take over and get it back up

- Repeat.

After we had had enough they came over with their camera phones and said that they were reporters and wanted to interview us. who knows if its true or not. But somewhere out there there is footage of us trying to answer questions about the kite festival.

Me patiently waiting for the kite to get high enough, and then epically fail, letting it plummet to the ground

We loved the flying kites part of the kite festival. We didn't love how on every second rooftop there were speakers on full volume (speakers as big as you can imagine) blaring out music of all varieties all night and all day. I truely can't describe to you just how loud this was.

When the ringing in our ears became too much it was time to leave Pushkar, next up is Jodhpur “The Blue City”.

Love always,

Claire and Luke (Luke was lazing on the beach as I wrote this so he counts as a co-author too right)