23rd December 2014
I had to wake up early in the morning, 5 was the scheduled time, but with the warm cozy bed and winter, I woke up at 7. Matteo was supposed to travel with me, but he was feverish last night and in the morning too, we decided that he wasn't fit to travel with stops, I bid him good-bye and started on my trip. I took a Rajasthan Roadways bus to Ajmer, I slept all through the couple hour long journey and woke up directly in Ajmer. On the Ajmer bus stand, I saw a city bus starting for Pushkar, I got onto to that bus, and took a seat. Pushkar is surrounded by hills all around and the view from the bus window is majestic, after a 30 minute ride, I reached this small, serene, and calm town, with a few hotels named after western bands(There was a Hotel Nirvana with posters of Bob Marley all around, there was a Hotel Pink Floyd with the famous album cover photo of The Dark Side of Moon). Pushkar was a big relief from the hustle and bustle of a usual city, maybe because it is so small that it can be covered in few hours(Though I'd recommend staying there for at least a day, just because of the serene atmosphere and the calmness all around) on foot. While walking on the Ghats of Pushkar, I saw a priest pointing to a guy to get his shoes away from the holy lake, the guy looked familiar, I went closer to him and I realised that it was Jerry, I had met him in Jaipur Zostel( but only for an hour or so, he had to catch a train to Ajmer early in the morning), He helped me with my backpack, I was carrying two backpacks and it was getting harder to carry them with a camera in hand, Jerry took one of them on his back as he wasn't carrying any bags. Jerry told me that, he missed the train to Ajmer, because at first it was delayed by 5 hours and then it arrived on a platform different than the one it was supposed to, he saw the train leaving. He took a private bus to Ajmer which dropped him on the outskirts of Ajmer instead of a Bus stand, and with nothing else to do he talked to a tuk-tuk who asked for 1000 Rs but later came down to 700Rs (The distance was hardly 15 Kilometers, the normal fare would have been like 200 Rupees tops) We chatted about our lives on the ghats of Pushkar for an hour or so and still it felt like minutes, he dropped me to the bus stand and I bid him goodbye, hoping to meet him again in Jodhpur.
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| The Ghats of Pushkar. |
The Kids
I got down at the Ajmer Railway station, I had to take a train to Jodhpur, the train was running late by 15 minutes, and when it was about to depart a family came running in , there were two middle-aged women, a teenage girl, and two kids, they were accompanied by a man who was probably here to drop them at the station, from their conversation it seemed like they had taken a big risk by booking their tickets in this train, soon everything settled and the train started moving, the kids were in playful mood, and were jumping from one berth to the other, they kept dropping pillows from the upper berths and their mothers kept scolding them feeling embarrassed, I couldn't stop but smile, one of the kids noticed me smiling and asked me "Where you naughty like us too?", I looked at the ladies and saw them smiling while waiting for a response from me, "Nope, I did whatever my mother told me to do" I lied, the women knew this and laughed. The kids sat silently on their seats, after a few minutes of silence one of them again queried, " What do you do?", "I am a Software Engineer" I said, the other kid said that he wanted to be an engineer too, that was probably the first kid who actually wants to be an engineer. We played games, the kids kept giving me tongue twisters and I gave them harder ones ("Betty wanted to eat some butter, but the butter was bitter, so betty bought some better butter to make the bitter butter better"), 4 hours of the 6 hours journey seemed to pass in minutes, the family got down at Pali, I shook hands with them and asked them for a photo, they obliged. I took a nap for the remaining part of the journey and landed in Jodhpur to a pleasantly cool and windy weather.
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| The Kids |
