A day in Pushkar

Category: Travel 

Pushkar is an old city located at 14 km North-West from city of Ajmer, Rajasthan.

The beauty of Pushkar is its smallness and its great geography, and on top of that, it holds hundreds of Hindu temples which make it a holy place for them. These temples are years-aged and draw hundreds of pilgrim everyday from across the country. In recent days, the presence of foreign travelers has increased. I believe one of the reasons for this is the camel safari.

        If you visit Ajmer and have some spare time in your hands, it is worth a try to visit Pushkar. Even if theoretically Pushkar is 14 km away from the city center of Ajmer, there is a shortcut road that goes over the Aravalli mountain range and makes the total trip to 6 km. If you take this road, and when you are at the peak, you will have an awesome birds-eye-view of both of the cities, Ajmer and Pushkar.  

     I and my wife recently travelled to Ajmer. When we were done in Ajmer Sharif it was early hours of the day. As we were travelling intermittently, we did not have a fixed plan about where to go next. To do some research, I turned on my magic device WikiReader that allows me to browse all the articles in Wikipedia offline. There I came to know about this wonder city.  By the time we got into Pushkar it was about 11 am. At the entrance of the city we were charged 30 rupees tax to enter into the city. This is very common in India, when you get around you could be stopped anytime and be charged money. Although you are given a receipt, sometimes it is not even written in Hindi, so you will never know what you have paid for. This time though, our driver said to us that the city government takes this money from visitors to keep the city clean and tidy. It is true that Pushkar seemed to be a little cleaned than other typical Indian cities.

     When we hit the city, our Chevrolet SUV was being surrounded by a group of young men who were riding motor bikes. In many ways, they were trying to draw our attention. From our previous experience in Fatehpur Sikri, we knew that how irritating and arguing they could be. They claim as local guide and keep you bothering even if you said straight no to them. So we did not stop and continued driving, but they escorted us until we reached the city center. We got left off once we had told them that we are Muslims and not interested in visiting temples. We were there only for the Camel Safari.

      Now that we got into the city, we needed a plan. My intent was to have a camel safari and if time permitted visit some must seeing places. When our driver was feeling up diesel, I went ahead and asked the pump owner about the best hotel in town. From my experience, I knew that a good hotel can provide us more information about the expedition. In 20 minutes, we ended up in a hotel called Master Paradise. The manager appeared to be very helpful. He had provided us all the needed information for the Safari, but he advised it was not a good idea to go out until the afternoon when the heat would start subsiding. So it came down to the fact that we would have to stay overnight in Pushkar as the Safari would end at about 8:30 pm. So we checked in on that very hotel and asked the manager to have everything arranged for the Safari. The hotel manager called in a man named Dogba and let me to talk with him. Initially he charged 1500 rupees for two camels for a 4 hour Safari, but after a little bargaining, he came down to 1200. It had been fixed that he would pick us up right in front of the hotel at 4:00 pm. We were advised to take enough liquids with us. In Rajasthan, in this hot weather, just water does not do the trick. The best option is to squeeze some fresh lemon into the water bottle and add some salt in it. This way it would rehydrate the water you are losing continually.

  We got couple of hours before we set off our camel ride. The hotel got an excellent swimming pool. We spent a good one hour in there. We lucked out that there was no one in the pool area at that time. It might be because of the off-season. So we relaxed and felt the atmosphere. Across one side of the pool, there were series of huts in line that were also locked up for the off-season, we saw a handful of monkeys playing on the roof of the huts. They were pretty big unlike the monkeys we used to see in the zoo. Earlier, we also had seen lots of Monkeys playing around all over the town. Monkeys might have a connection with holy places. From the swimming pool, we have had a panoramic view of the Ravalli Mountains. It is worth mentioning that Pushkar city is mostly surrounded by Aravalli Hills. This is the mountain where most of the precious stones of India are coming from. I assume, most of the forts in west Rajasthan were built using these stones. Moreover, the lucky stones that we wear on our fingers also come from Aravalli. The other parts of Pushkar are the desert, some part of the Thar. Unlike western Rajasthan, it was not flat and sand dunned. It was rather a bit hilly and made up of mixture of sands and soil.

  Finally we were all set for the ride. Two camels were ready for us. Their names were Sushil and Mr. Jone. We also got two little guides for us who would take us in the middle of the desert. I did not like the idea though of getting young kids involved in any professional works, but what could be done? That’s how it works all over the sub-continent. I insisted Mr. Dogba though, but he seemed not to get my point, he said there is no worry, the boys had been doing it days in days out.

  Getting on the camels was the most difficult part of the journey. It reminded me the movie Sonar Kella where Lalmohon babu was scared to death when tried getting on a camel. I was not worried about me though, I was thinking about my wife, Could she handle this? In my knowledge, she has never had any outdoor activities like this all her life. It looked like Mr. Dogba was aware of the fact that ladies should go first, otherwise seeing anybody getting on would cause them not to even think of riding a camel. Anyway, my wife managed to do it, I was standing besides just in case she might fall off and I would have to catch her. Now it was my turn and I also managed to do it, but speaking truly I was very scared. At first we were having difficulty when the camels started walking. Unlike horse or elephant riding, it was too bumpy, it was too high at the same time. My wife was about to cancel the trip, she was angered and called out Mr. Dogba and said either Mr. Dogba would give us some grown-up as a guide or we were going to quit. But Mr. Dogba comforted my wife by telling her that everything was going to be ok, she would get used to it after few blocks.

  Mr. Dogba was proven right after few minutes and we began to have fun. As our hotel was located on the other side of desert, we had to go through the city. Because camels are too high, we were able to see the people's backyards over the boundary walls. Sometimes we were about to hit the telephone wiring that goes right above our heads and we used to bend down to avoid accident. Other than that it was too good to be riding on camels. Camels are usually a slow ride when they walk, but it was quite ok with us. People on the streets were looking at us, we too were waving off to the kids. On the way, we saw few times, children were having poop at roadside and even they waved us from that position.

   After about half an hour, we reached at Brahma Mandir. This place always remains crowdy by pilgrims. At this part of the city, the road was lined up with shops that sells typical Rajasthani stuff such as gifts, clothing, shoes that are surely made up of Camel leather. We stopped over for few minutes in there. I got my 12-year-old guide to buy us Coca-Cola. We also bought them Coca Cola as they appeared to be thirsty.

   When we passed by Brahma Mandir, we could see the desert for the first time. We left the city road and entered into a narrow road that would lead us to the sunset point. Our intent was to get to that point well ahead of time before the sunset. Sunset in ocean, I have seen long ago in Coxes bazaar, sunset in the mountain, I have seen in the Rocky mountain, and this was the last one, Sunset in the desert. We didn’t know that our camels were too hungry until we got to this area. There were lots of trees by the roadside and they started eating leafs out of the trees. Our little guides were helpless refraining them from eating. We also tried, but without success. It seemed that we could not make it to get into the sunset point. But it did not bother us that much. We actually were enjoying everything around us. I did not know that my wife would like this safari this much. I took a solemn vow that going forward, I would take my wife to this kind of adventure every summer.

   On our way, we came across a gipsy colony, It was kind of living in the middle of nowhere, I was wondering how they managed drinking water from here. The colony was similar to ‘bede' colony in our country except for the fact that people wears typical Rajasthani dress and there was no snake business involved. Men tend to wear dresses in white, most likely to protect them from extreme heat, and women wears colorful though some of them cover up their face by white veil. And there were children, lots of them. They were playing with sands, the only thing they had it handy. I was wondering how they would take bath before go to beds, I was not seeing any water nearby.

     After much efforts put by our little guides, we were able to get to the Sunset spot few minutes before the sunset. We were more excited because we were getting off the camels for some time and could stretch out for a while. We relaxed for few minutes and then took some photographs. By this time, the Sun began setting behind the hills. It was beautiful to observe the scene.  We found the sand dunes around us very attractive in the light of the setting sun. Out of nothing appeared a man wearing typical Rajasthani dress. He seemed to be a singer. He played a very nice tune on his violin-like instrument. He sang couple of songs and we liked them all. In exchange I handed him 20 rupees upon my return. He also helped us getting on the camels. We were on our way back to the hotel. This time our guides made the camels run so we can get back to hotel in time.

   At the end of the day I felt very satisfied and fulfilling. After the meal, I took a cup of coffee to round off the day. It was about 9 pm and I was thinking to watch something on the TV. But my wife set her mind to go shopping. I replied to her, at this hour? She said, the shops are open until midnight.