We set off from Udaipur to Pushkar with very bad karma. A black cat ran across the road in front of us just before we ran into a cow. (Cows are sacred here to the extent that they are allowed to roam freely on the roads and if you tread in their droppings it’s considered good luck, even if you’re wearing sandals…). We then drove a little further to a toll gate where we were told to back up by the officials and hit a very small car with a very large truck. There was no damage to us, but the tow bar completely caved in the front of the 7-day-old Vaxhall Nova parked about 2 inches behind us. The impressively bearded chap inside was less worried about his car than why a woman was being allowed to drive our truck.
Despite all this we made it to Pushkar a day earlier than planned to visit the annual Pushkar Camel Fair, at which 250,000 people congregate to trade 50,000 camels. The end of the fair coincides with the full moon festival at which tens of thousands more people come to wash away their sins in the Pushkar holy lake. The lake is considered touched by Brahma and is the place where Ghandi’s ashes were scattered.
The first day we went to the Mela Ground to watch some of the days events, such as the wrestling, moustache competition (they were pretty big), and the Indian vs Foreigners water pot breaking contest, which as the first foreign winners in the history of the event got our picture on national TV and in the Times of India newspaper. After our exertions we retired to a local hotel with a balcony overlooking the thronging masses in the streets below.
The second day I stupidly decided to walk up a hill to a temple – pretty exhausting on the way up, but about 38C on the way down. Found a little bar overlooking the Ghats (the platforms from which the locals wash in the lakes/rivers) then discovered that Pushkar is too holy to serve beer or meat or dairy products, so had a very good vegan brunch.
Got back to the hotel and asked if there were any cookery courses in town as I fancied learning to make a proper indian dal (lentil curry). They didn’t know of any courses but kindly invited me into the hotel kitchen where the chef and I made a late lunch for the hotel’s 7 staff, so I got to make dal plus chapatis and gravy, which everyone seemed to like.
Spent the rest of the afternoon lazing about then headed off to the Camel Fair’s closing ceremony – lots of music and dancing followed by a feeble fireworks show (the rockets fly up noisily, then don’t explode). After the show we went back to the bar overlooking the Ghats to wait for midnight and the full moon when people can start their washing. Whilst waiting a family of buskers started playing and dancing which was ok, but completely overshadowed by the two students who joined in with some energetic Bollywood style dancing.
We were supposed to leave Pushkar on the following day, but the volume of people coming and going for the washing ceremony had trapped us in so we decided to stay an extra day. Got up a bit late and turned on the local news to see thousands of people washing at the Ghats so hurried down there and it was chaos – thousands of people coming to and fro had led to a massive crush in the streets. I had visions of becoming a footnote to the BBC news: ’30 people were killed today in a crush at a religious festival in India. Among the dead were 3 Britons’. We couldn’t get as far as the market of the Mela ground so ducked into another hotel to sit on the balcony again and watch the melee from above.
When the others went back to the hotel I jumped on a camel back to the far side of the fair and walked back through the massed crowd, to get a few photos, drink some chai and generally experience the thronging mess. Finally made it back to the hotel alive to gather the others and went to sit by the lake for the final part of the ceremony – the lighting of candles for the dead, which are then floated across the lake on little paper boats. Quite something and unfortunately completely beyond the capabilities of my little camera to photograph.
