The next day having breakfast I met Kay and Karen who had just wrapped up a couple of months at a yoga retreat outside of Mumbai and decided to tag along with them to go meet a friend of theirs they had met the day before...Andre. A Canadian in his mid forties that had been to Pushkar off and on for 20 years, but living there for the past 5 year, Andre turned out to be quite the character, with a strong affinity for dancing and need to be the center of attention. We all had lunch together and it was apparently fairly quickly that Andre was one who didn't so much talk with you as talk at you, and had a habit of jumping from one tangent to another and saying a lot without ever really finishing anything. It was mildly entertaining to watch/experience for a while but before long became tiring.
After lunch we followed him around as he led us through back streets to place we wouldn't have otherwise seen, which was nice, but he seemed to pay little heed to the ladies requests for specific stops while at the same time asking what they wanted to do/see. Everwhere we walked he did seem to know quite a lot of locals but I couldn't quite tell if they were actually his friends of if they simply endured him and had fun with him as the 'eccentric foreigner'; there were definitely times where people seemed decidedly annoyed with him (such as when he started dancing in the middle of what appeared to be the female contingent of a wedding party), but he either feigned ignorance or genuinely had no idea of his inappropriate behavior and the resultant negative vibes from the locals around him.
We shuffled between a few temples and after much cajoling, back-and-forthing and side-tracking finally made it down to the lake for sunset, a spot where the tourists flock for the good view. As we approached Andre heard the music playing and used the opportunity to dance with revelry his fairy dance and get a few eyes pinned on him. We sat for a while watching the sun go down and decided to walk back along the water to our hotel. Andre insisted we go a different way and when we refused he danced away with closest passerby and like that he was gone, somewhat thankfully.
After a long day, close to midnight, I made my way to the bus-station to wait for my 'sleeper bus' to Udaipur, something I had been told was quite a comfortable experience, bunk-beds in a bus...unfortunately the reality turned out to be less than fun...
Photos: Pushkar
After lunch we followed him around as he led us through back streets to place we wouldn't have otherwise seen, which was nice, but he seemed to pay little heed to the ladies requests for specific stops while at the same time asking what they wanted to do/see. Everwhere we walked he did seem to know quite a lot of locals but I couldn't quite tell if they were actually his friends of if they simply endured him and had fun with him as the 'eccentric foreigner'; there were definitely times where people seemed decidedly annoyed with him (such as when he started dancing in the middle of what appeared to be the female contingent of a wedding party), but he either feigned ignorance or genuinely had no idea of his inappropriate behavior and the resultant negative vibes from the locals around him.
We shuffled between a few temples and after much cajoling, back-and-forthing and side-tracking finally made it down to the lake for sunset, a spot where the tourists flock for the good view. As we approached Andre heard the music playing and used the opportunity to dance with revelry his fairy dance and get a few eyes pinned on him. We sat for a while watching the sun go down and decided to walk back along the water to our hotel. Andre insisted we go a different way and when we refused he danced away with closest passerby and like that he was gone, somewhat thankfully.
After a long day, close to midnight, I made my way to the bus-station to wait for my 'sleeper bus' to Udaipur, something I had been told was quite a comfortable experience, bunk-beds in a bus...unfortunately the reality turned out to be less than fun...
Photos: Pushkar
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