K2: North East Meets East: PUSHKAR Lake's Heaven... or Hell?

LIVE BLOG - We are still here as I post this - a rare event.

We arrived in Pushkar in the wee small hours, an hour or so later than scheduled, having been stalled on a roundabout until a mechanic showed up to replace whichever part the starter motor fires up in a coach (spark plugs??).

RISING STAR Lovely hotel #1 Early morning traffic, horns, barking dogs, phlegm-snorting men.

A ragged night's sleep. Kim doesn't have an 'off' switch, so she was off looking at temples by noon. Bugger that.

I'm done with India now, ready for the next thing. I'll evaluate things later, as we came here for some RnR before finishing our odyssey in Jaipur and Delhi but, bloody helling, this is the noisiest, most annoyingest place we've been to.

Billed as a tranquil, spiritual Mecca set around a lake bordered by temples and ghats, which is all true, it fails to mention the streets are like a speedway track, the place is full of hippies and, crucially, it's "Wedding Season".

So it begins.

Who knew they all get married at the same time?

By nightfall the narrow main street is blocked by an Indian wedding party all done up to the nines, the bejewelled stooge marooned on his white horse, ironically a spare part at his own wedding, the mob eddying around him and a sort of small ice cream van, but with no ice cream, just MASSIVE BLARING TUNELESS JANGLING SPEAKER HORNS!!!

"Waddya think of Sunder_band...!?" Warming up earlier in the day.

These are pulled along, extreeeeemely slooooowly by old geezers dressed like clockwork soldiers, one of them carrying a banner on a pole like some crap Sgt Pepper trades union guild.

Of course there are drummers too, there always are. An abrasive snare and booming bass, a Hell-bound juvenile jazz band of reanimated zombies.

Surrounding this maelstrom are half a dozen blokes bearing massive spangly parasols, each lit up by a cluster of 1,000,000 watt LED bulbs.

Bringing up the rear is a 4x4 with several rows of full beam halogen lamps mounted on a roofrack, the car also towing a generator to keep the whole shebang powered up. It takes about seven attempts to jackknife it 'round a corner, holding up everything in its wake - people, scooters, cows...

And the wedding party are all sober! It's insane! If it wasn't so annoying I would photograph it. Kim did a video of it:

So yeah, I'm done with India - worn down with the chaotic racket. Dreaming of the cool, green hills and snowy peaks of Nepal.


VAMDEV FORT Lovely hotel #2 Disco central by night, construction work by day.

Oh, and if the street processions weren't enough, the wedding parties all decamp to massive marquees, right next to residential areas, ie our hotel, where they proceed to hold full-on wedding discos with festival-rigged sound systems until after midnight. On a school night. Several school nights.

"It's for you, Ethel" Outside our window (wedding marquee to rear)

Rest? Relaxation? It's quieter on a tuktuk in Delhi!

And the hippies - they're still a thing? Scruffy herberts hanging about with their dreadlocks and waistcoats. White men with dreads should be arrested on sight. It's probably an old man's envy, but what with their acoustic guitar and drums and their placid, too-cool attitudes, they just rile me. They'll all be trusties too, I bet.

Darkness falls.

Looks tranquil now, don't it?

Kim loves Pushkar, though. She's been for a swim in the hotel pool, had a facial, visited the market to buy some fancy trews and all the temples to be hassled by the monk mafia on the ghats.