Surrounded by desert, though more the rocky hilly kind rather than sand dunes, seeing it for the first time was disappointing – like when you see a picture of a succulent looking chicken breast in a fast food eatery and are served a plate of awful looking rubber – I felt betrayed. The pristine blue lake in the picture had been replaced by a half-full brown dirt pit. The empty part of the lake was a construction site – they were deepening the lake before the monsoon season, as there had been bad floods here not too long ago (it's hard to imagine any sort of rain falling here right now mind).
It still looked great from the full part
We picked our hostel using the recommendation of an Aussie/Kiwi couple we had met at the monkey temple in Jaipur. They arrived one night before us, and most of our Pushkar experience was shared with them. Having a common drinking culture is a great bonder when in a country with none.
We had been on the go since our arrival in Delhi, and Pushkar immediately felt like a more relaxed place. This was no more evident than in our hostel host, Omi, who offered us a beer before we had even seen our room. He knew we liked to drink, because he had dated an Irish girl for a good while, before his family intervened and set him up with his now current (Indian) wife. I got the impression that he wasn't totally pleased with this, but who am I to comment on how other cultures work?
We were so relaxed upstairs in the hostel that we didn't leave the rooftop at all on our arrival day – beers and chat with Omi the host, Carl the Kiwi and Gemma the Aussie were a nice break from forts, temples and palaces. I also met an English guy who's wife is from Dromina. For those of you that aren't familiar with north Cork geography Dromina is a village not too far from my home town of Buttevant – even on the other side of it, it's a small world.
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