Camels

Bright and early, Kate and I stumbled out of bed to go camel riding.We met our guides and the camels at 5 am right in front of our hotel.What service!The camels were laying on the side of the road and were easy to mount.Standing up was a two step process. You had to lean back and hold onwhile the camels first snapped up into a kneeling position and second got up on their hind legs while straightening out their front legs.You felt like you were gonna fall of the whole time.

The ride wasn'tnearly as rough as I expected and before long we had left town andwere riding into the cool morning of the desert.The desert itself was surprisingly lush. The rainy season had justended a few weeks before and all of the foliage was still greenbecause of it. Our camel drivers/guides ended up being teenagers 17 and 18 years old (Indians seem much older than they are to me). We travelled in a circuit around a big hill on the edge of the city andwere back at our hotel in around 3 hours. Both drivers were really nice, but mine was the one who really spoke English. Kate and I bombarded him with questions and found out that Male camels are muchbetter than female camels for manual labour among other things. If we had been in Pushkar just 3 weeks later, we learned, we would have hit the annual Camel fair. With over 6000 camels, horses and cattle for sale, it would have been quite a sight.

Back at the hotel, Kate was keen on having Indian breakfast. So we asked what to order. We ended up having chai (spiced tea) with parathas (flaky bread) and dahi (yogurt-like curds). Having been scarred by Asian breakfasts elsewhere, where soup and rice seem to be major staples, Indian breakfast was a nice surprise. The dahi especially had a nice sour flavour which I found quite appetizing. Before leaving town, our driver took us too the sacred lake and the Brahma Temple.

The sacred lake was nice and tranquil with the the lake. Apparently if we actually took the flowers from them, theywould try to charge us something ridiculous like 200 USD dollars for the service. The Brahma temple was nothing spectacular, but was interesting to visit because it is the only temple in India where you can worship Brahma . Brahma is a Hindi god who plays a great role in the creation of the universe, but spend most of the rest of history deep in meditation. In order to enter the temple, we had to take off our shoes and then ascend a set of marble stairs up to the temple entrance.

Inside theTemple walls, everything was covered with white marble memorials todead loved ones. Most were in Hindi, but some were written in English, Arabic, or even Japanese. The English ones were the standard "In loving memory of..." that you find on tombstones at home. Many stones near the central structure in the temple were inlaid with big silver coins from the country of the person who paid for the stone. Inside the Central sanctuary, there was a statue of the god and people lined up to receive some kind of holy water from a priest.

Our driver camewith us and instructed us to receive water how to receive water fromthe priest. Today was yet another day of driving. We left at 9 am and didn't getto Agra until 10 pm. We stopped once in Jaipur to get lunch and seethe Hawa Mahal or 'palace of the winds,' which turned out to be reallynice. We got a guide for cheap and he showed us around in under 20minutes (one of our conditions). You could see the courtyard where theMaharajah's concubines and wives bathed naked and them many manywindows where they sat all day enjoying the breezes that naturally blew through.

After many hours of driving, we made it to Agra. Out driver washilarious on the way. We were chatting about Camels and cars and hisfavorite Hindu god-Shiva, which we joked might be due to her frequentdepiction with large breasts (but she's known as the destroyer, so I would watch out). We said goodnight to our driver, ate again andheaded off to bed.