It was a week after Christophe and Sandra left, Michel and Fredy arrived by knocking our door. The visitors have come and go and now the life goes back to normal. To have a normal life isn’t that easy as we are always planning to discover this Incredible India. I have a feeling that after all these time: started to get use with what we have and what we can’t have, what can see and what we cannot see. It is all about time. The last travel we had with Michel and Fredy, taught us about how to see the thing and accept it as it is and then only we can enjoy what we have seen.
The car broke down again this time. It seems the same problem that we had last time on our trip back from Manali. It was 5.45 am and was cold. We stopped in the middle of no where; there was just an engineering school not far away from where we stopped. After a while that they have tried to repair the car, we found out that the car won’t make it not even for 1 km a head. So, we decided to continue at least until Agra, at least to see the Taj Mahal. If they came all the way from Switzerland, it would be bad if they don’t see the famous Taj Mahal. First, we had to find the transport which can carry us straight away to Agra, and there he was the school bus driver offered us his help by sending us to our destination with only RS.100/- for all of us.
Finally we managed to reach Taj Mahal and decided to continue our trip until Jaipur on the same day and headed to Pushkar on the next day.
Well this time, I will speak only about Pushkar. Bewitching Pushkar has a magnetism all of its own, unlike anywhere else in Rajasthan. It’s a Hindu pilgrimage town, a cluster of pale onion domes, with 400 milky temples, where regular pujas (prayer) create the town’s episodic soundtrack of chanting, drums and gongs, and devotional songs booming out from crackling speakers. The town curls around a holy lake, said to have appeared when Brahma dropped a lotus flower. It also has one of the world’s few Brahma temples. Pushkar is only 11km from Ajmer but separated from it by Nag Pahar, the snake mountain.
The desert town clings to the side of the small but beautiful Pushkar Lake, with its many bathing ghats (steps or landing on a river) and fabulous temples. Pushkar town remain amazingly small despite the constant stream of visitors, and it’s a twisting maze narrow streets filled with interesting little shops, food stalls, hotels and temples. Fortunately, there’s virtually no motorized traffic in the main bazaar, making it a pleasurable place to explore at leisure.
Ajmer is a bustling, hectic town around 130km southwest of Jaipur. Ajmer contains one of India’s most important Muslim pilgrimage centres – the shrine of Khwaja Muin-ud-din Chishti, a venerated Sufi saint who founded the Chisthtiya order, which still exists as the prime Sufi order in India today – and has superb examples of early Muslim architecture. But Ajmer’s combination of high-voltage crowds, commerce and traffic, it’s very much a pilgrimage site rather than travellers’ hang-out, which accounts for the dearth of good accommodation and that was why we chose to stay in Pushkar. Apparently, Ajmer gets busy during Ramadhan and the anniversary of the saint’s death
Big kiss from NDH/Gros becs de NDH
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