Day 122 Wednesday 17 January 2007 Pushkar

We set out to explore the lake and bazaars of this holy town, passing cows and camels wandering around the narrow streets. Avoiding, as much as it’s possible to avoid, the touts and persistent would be guides we spend a pleasant morning shopping and haggling, collecting pashmina shawls, turbans and assorted trinkets. We venture in to the Brahma temple, the most famous one in Pushkar and the only one in the world, apparently, but are not that impressed. There are over 400 temples in the town, many of them clustered around the central lake where hindus come to bathe at the many ghats (or steps), gaining heaps of brownie points along with cholera, dysentery and all manner of communicable diseases. Fortunately the water level is low so no-one is bathing at this time of year.

We stop for lunch at a roof-top restaurant with views over the lake and town where we have delicious vegetarian curries and naan, pity about the lack of beer. Then we wander back to the hotel for some blogging and a well earned snooze.

We seem to have forgotten about blogging the distance and weather for the past few entries. Maybe we’ll reinstate it when we get back up to speed and on with the journey. For anyone whos interested, we’ve done just over 18,350kms and bought 2,485li of petrol – pity JLL’s fleet card doesn’t work in India – thats an average of 13.5li/100k which isn’t bad since for the last 3 months its been running mostly 2 stroke or cooking oil.