Hotel Ajmeru

... Petrol station forecourts are also good for a cut through. Driving is aggressive but no road rage & it's sort of expected really. We saw a few (old) dead lorries but somehow it generally works.
Ajmer is the nearest town to Pushkar (15km) so I'd decided to stay there to avoid the tents at Pushkar - but it's the first day of the wedding season. We crashed the first procession in a local village on the way in - bride on white horse, mobile disco ...

... saying something like he wouldn't get with Jazz while I was here, that we'd talk in the morning, it's 4pm and I still haven't seen him.

On days like this I feel like why the **** am I in Pushkar? Nothing but a hangover to nurse, watching the fan spasm between life and death as the electricity fails. Watching ants march towards the spilt Manzaa drink, wallowing in it syrupy sickly sweetness. Nothing to say that I have done. Nothing to in fact do, Bhai out, money ...

... is keen to conserve this huge museum of history. I left this visit until tomorrow and went on Umaid Bhawan Palace (or Chittar Palace), so called because of the type of sandstone used.

This was a huge impressive building on a rocky outcrop, with Maharajah Umaid Singh commissioning an English architect to design it. Building work began in 1929 and was completed in 1944 and having taken 15 years and 3,000 workers to accomplish this huge feat, Singh only enjoyed it ...

Jaipur, commonly known as the Pink City, gets its name due to being partially encircled by a battle-scarred wall and gates, where the town is so divided into rectangles that each specialises in different crafts. All the walls and most of the shops situated in long blocks are all painted a salmon-pink colour, some with white paintwork to embellish the design. It's an incredible sight to see and not one, I suspect, that'll be replicated anywhere else in India.

Pushkar, Rajasthan, India lyncraven

... a few days and felt the need to update my blog as well as my pictures on Facebook. After 1.5 hours fighting with a painfully slow connection, I left to meet with Yaarit at the 'Hill View Hotel'. She said that there was some cute Belgian guy there that I should go look at. I walked around asking people for directions and walked and walked and ended up on some highway. At this point I gave up meeting with Yaarit and decided to check out Cafe Enigma (which was near Seventh Heaven) instead ...

... A co-owner of the place talked to us on the bus from Ajmer to Pushkar, and offered us a good deal so we took it, and are glad we did. We cancelled our train tickets, haven't booked new ones yet, and are just Chillin. Readin, writing, all that. I'm downloading audiobooks for my shuffle (with the intent of convincing myself to listen to them and exercise). I've had five days of tabla lessons so far ...

... from him that this worked and that he had made a mistake. So we proceeded to looking up the next ticket and sure enough he insisted, absolutely insisted, on looking up the station codes and entering these into origin/departure boxes and telling us with absolute certainty that this train did not exist. The same thing happened for train 3. Anyway, after we had looked all this up we asked whether he could book this for us then and there (as ...

... 1198 and built a seven-arched wall inscribed with verses from the Koran. It was bustling with bare-footed people praying, chatting, bathing, chanting, and offering sacrifices. We felt quite out of place and didn't stay too long. The "treat" after having been cultured - the lonely-planet-recommended "delicious toffee" - tasted like lard. The other Ajmer attraction (there are no more rest ...

... that it brings. After more time watching Babas smoke dope than I care for I'm hot and thirsty. We eventually travel through Snake mountain (!) to get to Ajmer, a Muslim pilgrimage city and home to the Dargah - the tombof Sufi saint, Khwaja Muin-ud-din Christi, who came to Ajmer from Persia in 1192 and lived here until 1233. The Doctor and I donned our hats (all heads must be covered) walked through the ...

The first thing I noticed about India was the slightly sweet, hot smell. It's hard to describe really. The second is the traffic. You really do take your life into your own hands if you drive here I reckon, and all of those 'drivers from hell' programmes on Reality TV don't even come close to the chaos here. However, as yet, I haven't seen anyone crash or get run down, so it does work in it's own mental kind of way ...