Walking in Pushkar, Camel Trekking in Great Thar Desert and Bus Rides through the Himalayas

So at my last post I was at Pushkar, in Rajasthan. As said it is a holy town so I spent the first day looking at the various temples; it is the only place in the world to have a temple to Brahma, the creator of the universe and one of the three most important gods of the Hindu Trimurti. The next 2 days were spent walking round the hills outside Pushkar, it had dawned on me that I had not done any more exercise then sprint baywatch style into the sea at Goa and Varkala in the last month, and I was hoping to do the Annapurna Circuit, a walk over 300 km long and going up to 5416 m in the Nepalese Himalaya. These walks were fun, you could buy hobnobs in Pushkar (believe me, when your 1000's of miles from home, hobnobs are perhaps the greatest things ever) so I would generally take a packet of them and walk through scrub and clamber up steep rocky faces to have lunch looking out towards Pushkar and having a brilliant view of the Rajasthani planes.

After Pushkar, I travelled onto Jaisalmer, a 12th century Rajput fort in the middle of the desert. I met some Swedish girls on the bus on the way there, so we decided to do a camel trek together, and so we arranged a 3 day 2 night trek. Jaisalmer itself was amazing, a huge fort with elaborate ancient havellas inside. The trek itself was great, I rode on a camel called Raju, and the guides made roti (Indian flatbread) and curries for us, and we also slept out in the dunes. However, after three days my legs were ready to fall off - camels are not comfortable to ride on! Back in Jaisalmer, the next day was the culmination of the Indian Holi festival. This day involved having massive colour fights with bags of dye, as well as improvised water pistols with coloured water, think smingus dyngus on a massive, colourful scale! I got covered in dye, mostly red but with patches of greens, yellows and blues. It was insane, and when I got back to my hotel every Indian there was completely drunk (it appears that Holi is also a drinking festival). My waitoer saw me, managed after three attempts to pick up a menu, then stumbled over in my direction before crashing into a table on the way.

After Rajasthan I decided to go somewhere cooler, Shimla, a hill station in the foothills of the Himalayas would be good. A bus ride there from Delhi provided me with my first glimpse of the Himalayas, it was spectacular. I climbed up a steep hill (Shimla is just one huge hill with buildings on one side) to the YMCA and checked in, being told that only one of the bathrooms was working because "Monkeys got in and smashed the other one up".