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We move on to Pushkar, a holy city, a poor man's Varanasi, but for a place of worship it's certainly very commercialised and capitalistic. It's also a mecca for hippies, as despite it being a dry city, and totally vegetarian (as in no egg in the banana pancakes - tastes slightly bizarre), drugs it seems, not a problem! Top tip for Pushkar, do not order the 'special lassi' or any 'special' beverage, for that matter, as you might get more than you bargained for, getting high as a kite being one of them - unless that's your thing of course.
In order that we didn't get constantly hassled by err...holy people demanding donations of cash for petals and thread blessings, our group was taken down to the lake at the centre of town for an official blessing. By a holy man you may wonder, wearing traditional dress? No, our ...priest was a 20 odd year old playboy type, wearing that traditional holy dress/robe, of stonewashed jeans and a Levis t-shirt. We had to sit at the edge of the lake, barefoot, holding a silver plate filled with rice, sugar, thread, petals red powder & a coconut. Then we had to recite mantras, some in english, which as his english wasn't great, sounded more like a series of any words he could think of in our language - am I sounding cynical here? Finally we got our red bhindi dots on our foreheads, along with some rice stuck in there for good measure, and the promise of luck, health and happiness for me and my family, so you can't say fairer than that.
It didn't bring us much luck in the restaurant that night as we all waited 2 & half hours to get served, with people storming out in disgust, wonder when the luck thing starts to kick in.
Pushkar is famous for its gems & silver jewellery, so there was shopping aplenty or 'women be shopping' as my dad would say. And I would go as far as to say our group was like a swarm of locust descending on the jewellery quarter and devouring everything in sight in a mad frenzy - it was scarey to see, even for me.
The next evening we got to go on a camel safari, but I think my camel keeper had had a few too many special lassi's, as he kept wondering off aimlessly, leaving me to try steering the camel for myself - pretty hair-raising, I can't even ride a horse, so the camel had no chance of any decent instruction. As our group trotted through the evening market, it was hilarious to see the looks on the Indian people's faces. They were fascinated by these pastey foreigners atop the 7 ft camels, sliding around in an ungainly fashion trying manically to stay seated on the humps. Many of them stopped to point and take photos, we were famous, the star attraction of Pushkar for the evening. The camel safari saw us trekking into the trash filled desert, and a beautiful sunset toasted with chai, made from camel's drinking water -well, we're in India now!
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