Pushkar is a pilgrimage site for Hindus and Sikhs (along with being a major destination for the Holi Festival) and is also well known for the Pushkar Camel Fair which brings over 50,000 camels from distant places to be bought and sold.

Bordering the desert, it’s a dusty place and has a holier vibe than anywhere else I visited in India with it’s temples around every corner, ghats for pilgrims to bathe in and the sacred Pushkar Lake glistening beneath the hills.

My favorite moments from Pushkar include:

emerging from the darkness of our hostel room after 12 hours of throwing up to be greeted by hordes of stoned Israeli’s, covered in rainbow paint
hearing a vehicle approaching from behind and turning around to see a giant camel cart being driven by a 7 year old
the bull and monkey duo hanging out near our hostel
discussing app development and startup ideas with Kapil and Sunil, 2 young students from Jaipur we shared momos and fried rice with at the local Tibetan Restaurant
realizing an elaborate, multi-person effort to get us to pay to put flowers in Pushkar Lake was pretty much just a well organized sales funnel
thinking that this dusty little town was cited in the Mahabharata (a 2000 year old text that I read in Asian Studies class in high school) as the oldest religious hub in India… and here I was rolling through it’s purple stained alleyways on the back of a motorcycle in 2018.