Come sit right here and sleep while I slip poison in your ear...”
St. Vincent, “
Locations: Pushkar (Rajasthan)
Photos: http://princeton.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2050625&l=89579&id=1101094
Temperature: 96
Morale: 2
Spinning:
Talking: In terse, rude-as-possible soundbites to every tout who approaches me, preferably before they even open their mouths to bother me. “'Sh'—before you even start. That was a preemptive 'sh.' Just know that I have a whole bag of 'sh' with your name on it.”
What's next (I think):
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I think this line from
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I left you on the way to the
I think they parked the bus around the corner because they knew that I would go purchase enough muscle relaxants to put myself into a sleep from which I would never awake if I saw the bus prior to boarding it. This thing was a total piece of shit. For starters, the door was hanging from the side of the bus in such a way that it could not possibly close. Fine; I was sitting in the back of the bus anyway.
But where was the A/C that had been promised when I purchased my ticket? Oh, it was “A/C” in the form of open windows, which also included an all-you-can-eat special of mosquitoes and other various insects. And where were the seats that reclined fully, also promised when I bought my ticket? They didn't exist. Instead, there were regular seats, with compartments above them that were called “beds.” I was assigned one of these ”beds.”
In reality, they were not beds at all. They were disgustingly dirty, smelly, fabric-covered cushions surrounded by plastic on all sides. The dimensions of the plastic compartment were about 4ft x 2ft x 2ft, which is barely enough room to breath and not even close to long enough to lie down. Oh, but my “bed” was covered in crumbs of food, just in case I was hungry. I wasn't.
I asked if I could put my pack below the bus, seeing as there was clearly no room for it in my hot, smelly “bed” compartment. ”No.” Why not? “I don't speak English.”
So I put my pack at the bottom of my compartment, which left at least 2.5 feet for the whole of the length of my body. Brilliant.
By now I figured that I'd be better off just sitting in one of the seats for the whole trip—I'd probably manage to get more sleep that way. But all the seats were full of Indians who had paid less for their tickets than I had (after all, I had a sleeper ticket). So I climbed into my compartment, curled up into a ball, and attempted to sleep.
Somehow, I did manage to sleep for a few hours. But then, the driver must have decided to turn off the main road and start driving over a trail of rocks and logs, because I awoke to the worst jarring of the trip so far. It was so bad that my head kept slamming against the sides of the plastic compartment no matter how hard I tried to keep it steady. I should have known this was coming, as the final promise made to me while I purchased my ticket (which until now had remained unbroken) was a smooth ride. I should have known that someone promising me a “smooth ride” is much worse than saying nothing at all. Just the fact that the smoothness of the ride is on these guys' minds means that the ride must be anything but smooth. It's like a sign outside an internet cafe that says “Fast Internet.” These days, I just assume internet will be fast, but if the place has to write “Fast Internet” on a sign, you can bet it will be dirt slow.
Anyhow, I gave up on sleep and pulled my iPod out of my pack (which, thank god, was right in my compartment with me! Grrr). But the bus was bouncing so much that I couldn't get a good look at the iPod screen. So I just pushed play and took what they gave me.
Sure, the road was bad, but it was made far worse by the fact that the bus had no shocks whatsoever. By the end of the ride I seriously wanted to punch the guy who sold me the ticket and told me all those lies. But that's the beauty of his lies—he was way back in
We got to
As I was getting off the bus I met two travelers from
Even at 4:15 there were plenty of touts waiting at the bus stand. They told us that the first bus to Pushkar didn't leave until 7am, so we would have to take a rickshaw. And, what do you know, they just happened to be rickshaw drivers!
We ignored the touts as best we could and waited for the Pushkar bus to show up. It came at around 5am, and we arrived in Pushkar at 5:30. On the way to Pushkar I talked to the Maltese travelers a bit, and wow, these people were anti-everything. Talk about too cool for school. They tried to tell me not to go to the Taj Mahal because it was “way overrated.” Ok, maybe it's overrated, but even if you drop its ratings by half it's still by far the most popular tourist destination in
We got to Pushkar and the Maltese couple asked me if I wanted to check out some guest house with them, and I said no thanks. I'm cynical enough as it is.
I walked to a guest house in my guidebook, bargained to be able to check in right then (6am) without extra charge, and dropped my stuff and headed to breakfast.
A quick bit about Pushkar: it's a holy city, or, more accurately, a holy town, as its population is about 15,000. It has one of the only Brahma (one of the three main Hindu gods) temples in the world, so a lot of pilgrims come to visit the town and worship at the temple. The town is set around a holy lake, which has 52 bathing ghats around it so pilgrims can bathe in the holy water. Gandhi's ashes were sprinkled into the lake at one of the ghats, which is now called Gandhi Ghat. The town sounds really serene, right? That's what I thought when I read about it, too. Oops.
I ate breakfast at a place with a rooftop terrace that overlooked the lake. I had a banana crepe: the cornerstone of any Indian breakfast. The setting was quite nice, but during the middle of breakfast I hit a wall. Apparently the 2-3 hours of sleep I got on the bus prior to being jolted out of coherence was not quite enough. So after breakfast I headed back to the guest house and slept from 8-11:30.
I woke up feeling much better, showered, and then walked around the lake toward the
I reached the temple, and as I was about to enter, I was told I had to buy flowers to leave as an offering inside the temple. How much were flowers? 10 rupees. Ok, fine—I remembered reading something in my book about flowers anyway. So I walked into the temple, which was awash with Indian pilgrims, left half the flowers (my book recommended saving half the flowers for the lake, so you wouldn't be forced to buy more) in front of the statue of Brahma, and walked around the temple a bit.
A guy who couldn't have been more than 25 started talking to me as I was wandering around the temple, telling me about how he had just returned from a trip to
As we exited the temple, he turned to me and said, “Ok, you pay me what you like.” What? Dude, we were just having a conversation—I don't know how that requires me to give you money! It would have been bad enough if he had forced a guided tour on me, but he didn't even give me a tour—he just talked about his trip to Europe! What the hell was a guy who had the cash to travel to
I walked down to the lake with the other half of the flowers wrapped up in a piece of newspaper in my hand. When I reached the lake (I was at the part called Brahma Ghat, which is where Brahma once bathed... wait, what am I saying, Brahma is a fictional deity...) a semi-official looking guy asked where my flowers were, and I opened up my hand to show him, and he took the flowers out of my hand and dumped them onto a separate plate of similar flowers and handed the plate to me. “What?” “Friend, you take this plate, free of charge. You pay donation, what you like.” I was ready to kill this guy. I had already paid for flowers, and he had essentially stolen them from me and mixed them in with his flowers, which I was now supposed to buy from him. And don't believe for a second that I could “pay what I liked” for this plate of flowers. Oh no—if I didn't get to the correct price, you better believe they weren't going to let it slide.
Totally exasperated, I told the guy to keep his [expletive] flowers and walked down to the bank of the “holy” lake. I sat down and pulled out my guidebook to read about the place.
“No guidebooks allowed, holy place.” What? That is ridiculous. Did Brahma once tell his followers, “Thou shalt not consult Lonely Planet while sitting on the banks of my lake”? Annoyed, I put the guidebook away.
Then the guy who had told me that I couldn't read the guidebook approached me and started giving me a history of the lake, which I think was identical to what was in the guidebook. Still annoyed, I ignored him, and then he held out his hand, expecting money for his history lesson.
This was too much. I lost it. “Oh, so no guidebooks allowed so you can charge me for a 'guided tour'? Good thinking!” This place was ridiculous.
I got up to leave, but as I did two guys ran up and asked where my flowers were and said I couldn't leave this “holy place” without leaving an offering of flowers. Well, you know what, if this place is holy then I'll be damned. Since when is a holy place one where touts suck money out of everyone who comes to visit? If this place were really holy, or, more accurately, if these assholes took its so-called holiness as seriously as they said they did, they wouldn't be trying to screw me over. These people could use a lesson from the Sikh's
Whatever the reason, this place certainly did not seem very holy to me. It did seem like a big tourist trap, and one that I was ready to get out of as soon as possible. Totally disillusioned, I walked back to the bus ticket office and bought a ticket for the 7am bus to
I had lunch at a place called the Raj Garden Terrace, which had, you guessed it, a nice garden terrace overlooking the lake. I had some good Indian food, and lunch was really peaceful. Truthfully, this town could be quite pleasant if it wasn't for the people down below. It's unfortunate when people ruin an otherwise beautiful place, but it's happening all over this country.
I walked back to my guest house and on the way was again harassed by a handful of touts. These guys were even more aggressive than the
I went back to my room and tried to take a nap, but just then the power went out. I don’t think I’ve mentioned this before, but the power goes out multiple times a day in
I wrote off the entire town and spent the rest of the day in an internet cafe, except for a very peaceful dinner in this garden restaurant down the street from my guest house. Once again, I though about how this place could be really nice if people could just leave me alone for five seconds.
I went to bed around 11pm. The next morning's 7am bus to
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