Cars and Ruins...

January 15th

Packed for Pushkar today. We left the hotel around 10. We stopped at the Classic Car collection before we headed out of town. There were some amazing autos there!

We had quite a drive today. We passed down out of the hills back into the desert, and then back up again. Stopped for lunch, and drove up through a winding road to Pushkar at the end of the day, just as it was getting dark. The hotel is amazing – and it sounds like there are monkeys fighting outside our window. This is a holy city – I can’t wait to see it in the morning light!

Driving here is an adventure all in its own. Once you get over the initial shock, it is almost enjoyable – although the frequent honking and near-miss collisions are nerve-wracking. I still feel pretty safe, though.

We stopped at an old abandoned temple. Very old ruins, but amazing detail could still be seen in the structures.

I find it interesting, in all of my watching out the window, that many of the houses have advertisements painted on them – I have seen bicycle ads, cement, Jolly Fat-Go (whatever that is), tractor ads, so many different ones, all painted on houses or walls surrounding the fields. Another thing I found interesting is that at construction sites, along with all the men working are a bunch of women, in their brightly colored saris, carrying around rocks in bowls on their heads. It seems that they move the rocks out of the site, and I have also seen them carrying bricks. I have seen children doing this, too.
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On the way to Pushkar, we passed through many smaller towns. Marble is very easy to come by here, and it seemed that all we would see was marble shops after marble shops. You know what would be a great business to start here? A Marble shop! – I guess you have to do what is there for you to do…

We had dinner up on the roof – the workers at the restaurant were having a few drinks, and had a fire up there. They offered us to sit out by the fire, so we did, and it was nice and warm, even though we smelled a bit like smoke afterwards. Mike was worried that the monkeys would get us, but we didn’t see any. The cook was an interesting fellow. He said he was 22, talked of his girlfriend a lot, and used “delicious” in ways I had never thought of. He also liked the music of Michael Jackson – “not the man, but the music”. He had been working as a cook for tourists for 15 years – so since he was seven…