Okay, so I've moved around a bit since the last post, and at this point I'm in Delhi waiting to head out to Kathmandu on Friday, and checking in with (Whitman friend) Melissa Rhodes, studying abroad here in Delhi.
The quick recap of the last week:
I made it to Pushkar for the Camel Fair, which was actually pretty underwhelming. However, Pushkar tends to be a kind of vortex in which travelers find themselves unable to leave for weeks and months at a time, so I did get to see again many of the same people I had met at the guest house the first time through. They all seemed slightly confused to find themselves still in this odd little town, waiting for a fair that never seemed to begin--the residents kept assuring them that it would REALLY get going the next day, but after about a week, these assurances seemed to falter. Not caring to wait around for it to start, I stayed for a day, saw some "Camel dancing"--which consisted of a guy leading a camel around in a circle, occasionally changing directions, and, the, er, highlight, getting the camel to walk around on its front knees, and some other odd, mostly unimpressive events, then headed to the desert.
The one event that was a total blast was the "Spiritual Walk," which started at 7am, and I assumed was merely a quiet walk around the lake. It's taken a while, but this event was the final catalyst, I think, to get me to stop associating "spiritual" in India, with "quiet" or "reserved," as I tend to in America. Spiritual here often means to do things as big and as loud, as you can. The "spiritual walk" was an enormous parade, working its way through the narrow, packed streets of Pushkar, chock full of indian marching bands, reed flautists, drummers, and other music makers, trucks full of marigolds and rose petals, which people aboard tossed out onto the crowd (marigold flowers, you might know, are not the most delicate or lightest flowers to throw at people from a height, and after the fortieth or fiftieth volley, we all had marigold welts on our backs and faces, but it was all part of the wild fun of it), dancers, floats, costumes, and, of course, a ton of camels, all decked out and bejeweled in colorful, tacky decoration. By the end it was so packed that you basically were confined to one spot, and held there by the mass of people surrounding you, all equally unable to move, as the trucks and camels tried to work their way through. It was exactly what I was hoping for in going back to Pushkar for the fair, so, with that in my pocket, and growing really short on time before Nepal, I headed on to the next stop.
Jaisalmer is a town just on the edge of the Great Thar desert, and about 50km from Pakistan. It is home to a beautiful golden fort and several equally stunning, and intricately carved Jain temples. However, being rather tired of Rajasthani cities at this point, where shopkeepers on every road you walk are persistently calling at you to buy from them (hundreds of calls per day, from any and every shop you walk by), I decided largely to forgo the city, and head out on a camel safari instead--for an easy $10. The camels are bumpy, and the desert is hot, but it was a perfect excursion, the highlight being the night spent on the dunes under the nearly full moon, lighting up the desert with its pale shine for miles around. Our guides were great--an 11 year old boy and a 24 year old man from local rural villages--and the company, a friendly Ecuadorian couple who spoke fluent English, was splendid. We spent the night around a fire, and it was wonderful to see how all of us looked at it with the same eyes, regardless of our vastly different cultural backgrounds--and it doesn't get much more different than a rural Indian camel herder and myself. The mystery and captivation of a log campfire is universal.
As enjoyable as the trip was, two days of trotting along on camels wrecks havoc on a body not used to it, so by the time we finished, I was more than ready--my butt aching, and my spine feeling as if it had been so compressed that I was standing an inch or two shorter than my usual height. I got back to Jaisalmer, and caught the train to Delhi the next day--a twenty-five hour trip which starts in the desert where sand blows in the windows and accumulates in the compartments, and is then circulated by the overhead fans the rest of the way, making the inside of the train hazy, cloudy, and sand/dust-choked--a really hellish travel experience(particularly in the upper sleeper berth, which puts you about 2 feet from the top of the car, where the fans, and most of the sand is). So it's a surprise that, after Pushkar's dust kicked up by thousands of camels and tourists, and Jaisalmer's sandy air, and the train back, I arrive in Delhi and find the air quality to be one of the big perks.
That's the sum of things for now. I'm ready to head to the slightly less hectic Nepal, to embark on the next stage of this trip, away from the touts and traffic and breakneck travel of this part.
Dave
