India Day 1: Detour to Rajasthan

I arrived in Delhi airport after 4 hours of solid sleep on the plane. The first thing that I saw after getting my bags was Kate. It had been over a year since I had seen her and it was great to see her again.

A driver was there to pick us up and take us to our guesthouse located near the main train station. From thew moment we entered the highway, I knew that India was like no place I had been before. The drivers are crazy. They cut people off.. signal each other with long and short horn blasts and drive on the wrong side or curb of the road whenever it is convenient to pass. There were a few times I though we were on course for a head on collision. Why did anyone bother to paint lines, I wondered.

Kate and I weren't in the guesthouse long before the in-house travel agent was ready to plan out whole trip. There were so many places we "had to see" in order to see the real India (I thought his selling skills were the real India right in front of me). Kate was initially into the idea of getting part of the trip organized by him, but I was freaking out because I had already paid for our train tickets for the whole trip and had them delivered to the guesthouse.

I finally calmed down after 10 minutes of convincing the agent to stop talking and go get the tickets I ordered. He ended up refunded our first ticket to Agra so that we could take a car and driver for the first few days. We decided to leave Delhi for the last day of our trip and immediately ventured east into Rajasthan.

Our route took us on Highway 8, the main road from Delhi to Mumbai (Bombay)... this was a busy road with 6 lanes at one point, four at another, and 2 lanes at it's narrowest. The driving wouldn't have been so bad if 80 percent of the traffic hadn't been BIG trucks.
These trucks were huge and built for rough roads rather than for speed. At maximum they travelled 50 km an hour, but more often than not they averaged 35-40. This meant that we had to weave in and out of lanes narrowly missing head-on collisions. Perhaps it seemed more dangerous than it was in reality-- we rarely traveled faster than 70.

Our destination, Pushkar was over 300 km away, so this made for a full day of driving. We stopped only three times. Once for gas, once for lunch and once to get the tube replaced in the spare tire. I couldn't help but noticing that all we saw everywhere were men. Men in trucks. Men wearing turbans an smoking pipes. Men bathing and boys making chai and selling refreshment. This highway was clearly man territory, which led to an interesting phenomenon. Men and boys, any age anywhere, could not keep their eyes off of Kate. She was used to this treatment from travelling in Egypt, but it was a surprise for me. We both wondered what it would be like had she been travelling alone (her original plan before I decided to go too).

At 8 pm, we arrived in Pushkar. It was dark and hard to see anything, but you could tell from entering the main street that it is not a big place.

Out hotel was more than I expected. Although the pool water was green and nothing you would swim in, our room was spacious and comfortable. We ate some supper where there were locals Roma or Gypsies playing instruments and dancing for the few assembled tourists. We went to bed soon after with Kate's alarm set for 4:30 am the next morning.