Helen and Randall on the road

From our Jaipur hostel we managed to squeeze both of us, a Brazilian girl called Luana and all our luggage into an auto-rickshaw to the bus station, quite a feat. The three tickets for us to get to Ajmer (the direct bus to Pushkar was full with a wedding party, apparently!) cost 311 rupees, which was interesting given that it is a prime number, but whatever, it was a bargain.

The bus ride took about 4 hours and was a little alarming, but it was interesting to compare the new toll highways with the old, poorly maintained roads that passed through towns – I’m pretty sure that the last time I did the journey in 1994 it was all the latter. Interestingly, when stopping to pick up passengers our bus driver was still happy to stop in the middle lane of a 3 lane highway. Which was nice.

At Ajmer station we were mobbed by taxi/rickshaw/hotel touts but Luana and I headed out of the station and negotiated a good rate for a shared taxi while Randall minded the bags – these things are so much easier with 3! On arrival in Pushkar Luana decided to take a room at the same hostel as us which pleased the owners as we had brought them extra business!

The central courtyard of our hostel.

Breakfast on the terrace at the hostel.

Sunshine Breakfast.

After sorting out all our check-in business, doing some minor tech support for the hostel owner (helping him update his Hostelworld.com page) and handing over our laundry we headed for food at the Sixth Sense cafe, marvelling at their cunning pulley system for delivering food from the kitchen on the ground floor to the terrace cafe on the 3rd floor.

The next day we went for a wonder around the town and watched the sunset from a rooftop cafe:

Dilapidated and seemingly abandoned beautiful building. And Helen. And Cow.

An oasis in the desert…

The Brahma temple, seen across the lake and behind the Pushkar Lake Palace Hotel

The ‘holy’ lake.

Sunset over the lake

Sunset

Chill out cafe, great for watching the sunset (although not quite Cafe del Mar)

The ORIGINAL chill out cafe, of course!

In this cafe we discovered a bizarre pudding called ‘Hello to the Queen‘ which on investigation seems to be a regular on the backpackers circuit, although no-one seems to know where it originated. I’m guessing some stoned twonk with munchies…crumbled biscuits, chopped bananas, chocolate sauce and ice cream. A mystery, but Randall liked it (I picked out the bananas and pretended it was chocolate cheesecake)/

On our last day we  got up early (well, 7am) to do the steep hike up to the Saraswati temple on a hill above the town:

The start of the hike.

On our way back into town we stopped at the ‘Last Base Camp’ cafe where some other customers persuaded us to try Sandeep’s 11-herb/spice ayurvedic tea which turned out to be rather nice, containing 2 types of cardamom, cumin, anise, basil, pepper, ginger and other stuff (nothing naughty, he promised!):

Sandeep’s ‘Last Base Camp’ cafe, home of the ‘Magic Pinch’

The magic of the pinch!

After breakfasting and lazing around in the sun on our hostel’s terrace for the rest of the morning and early afternoon we wandered through town again and bagszied a spot a the ‘Sunset Cafe’ to watch our final Pushkar sunset:

Sunset last evening

Sunset Cafe

Then it was back to the hotel for a nap before the 11pm taxi to Ajmer for the 00.30 train to Udaipur, on which we shared a 4-berth first class AC compartment with an extremely loud snorer of an Indian chap.