Pushkar and more...

Erica and I are sitting in a little internet cafe in Pushkar, India at the moment. Apparently, there are 5000 hindu temples in a town with a population of 14,000 people. All the buildings are huddled around a smallish lake which was created by damning a river. It's pretty touristy, with much of the main drag feeling a bit like Haight Ashbury, but you can certainly see the draw once here. We're on a day trip from Ajmer and heading to Udaipur tomorrow...

Our short time here has been one of the most thought provoking of any visits I've made. There are constantly images and views which jolt me : today locking eyes for a moment with an old woman wearing an impossibly bright pink shawl over her head and a huge gold hoop through her nose. walking behind a cow which appeared to be dancing (trotting?) through a tight bazaar at night just blocks from the Taj Mahal while music played at ear splitting level. while coming home (from the "Monkey Temple") in a rickshaw in Jaipur, we passed a line of men who were all lighting candles with a water fountain behind them at dusk, all wearing amazingly bright white clothing. I wish I had the energy to try to capture most of them in words to help remember them for later. I wonder if evenutally one gets desensitized to such sights. I can't imagine it.

Racing through the streets, especially at night, in a rickshaw can be easily listed as one of my favorite activities at this point. It's a great way to see a great deal at a relatively rapid pace (when you aren't stuck in gridlock with diesel fumes blowing your hair back), with the always exciting addition of slight to major chance of bodily harm. I love the way traffic moves in this country. It appears chaotic at first, but it is an amazing dance (to me, I think Erica is less impressed) which results in a tremendous number of vehicles getting where they are going much faster than I could've imagined. On more than a few ocassions now when we've taken a rickshaw to a temple or tomb or reallyoldbuilding of some kind, I've found the ride to or from to be almost or definitely better than the sight itself.

So far we've been lucky and managed to stay healthy. As Erica noted today, at this point in Senegal, we'd both been sick, healthy, and then sick again. Given what we'd heard for the past however many years about travel here, I think this is something to be very happy about.

Yesterday we took our first non-tourist class or regular class train ride. Pretty mellow overall, but I'm glad it was only 2.5 hours. I wish I could speak even a lick of Hindi as the only conversations I could have were largely like charades. I would act out what I was trying to say and then my luggage rack mate would answer in english. I believe Erica slept nearly the whole way.

We've yet to figure it out, and I'll upload some pics later, but for some reason Erica is attracting some occassionally significant attention from Indians with cameras. We haven't been able to figure out if they are laughing with her/us or at her/us, but at this point she's had her picture taken 4 times with a variety of different people.

All for now...