Great goodbye to India
Beautiful and lovely Pushkar, streets full of gods, holy lake and yes, this is it, we go home tomorrow
Pushkar. Our last stop in India.
After quick morning visit of Jaipur we rushed to Pushkar, 3-4 hours away, to see this supposedly beautiful town. And beautiful it is! Pushkar is one of those totally endearing Indian towns with all the good stuff that India has to offer: it’s a holy town (yep, one more!) so it has nice spiritual atmosphere around its holy lake, it’s ancient and has beautiful Indo-Islamic architecture, it’s relatively small, it’s full of small shops selling cheap and beautiful things and it has a huge “laidback backpackers vibe” (as Lonely Planet always calls it). Indeed, it is a typical backpacker paradise, with loads of pseudo-hippie Westerners dressed in their pseudo-Indian clothes, and while it might not feel extremely authentic, it just feels nice and relaxing. Plus it’s really beautiful this town. It even has its color theme! Jaipur is the Pink City, and Pushkar is more-or-less-Blue-City, with most of the houses painted in pale shade of pastel blue. I have to say that Pushkar immediately became one of the highlights of this trip for me, despite (or thanks to?) spending there just few hours.
As a great bonus, the last day of our journey happened to collide with Shivaratri festival. As we were entering the town we saw tiny young Shiva all in blue and soon we found out that those were preparations for the festival. Very soon the streets flooded by processions of children and adults dressed as gods, marching bands, drumming and dancing people, flowers throwers and the rest of the population of Pushkar. Our good bye to India could not have been any better. A perfect Indian festival day in a perfect Indian town.
