Waking up, I still felt like getting back on the road and leaving Pune and Osho, perhaps to return another time. I packed up my bike and stopped at the German Bakery for another Omlette, knowing eggs can be hard to find away from touristic places.
I sat down at the only free chair, at a table with a beautiful young woman, Nina, who turned out to be from New York, was researching a paper on the Osho community, and decided within three minutes that she would rather come on the bike with me to see Pushkar. She went to get her bag, and we set off together an hour later. That's what I love about travelling -- how wonderful to experience such extraordinary trust and spontaneity! View image

Nina turned out to be the ideal travelling companion. She was enthusiastic about everything she saw, and about the experience of travelling by motorcycle, and never once complained, even though hours in the saddle certainly hurts the bum, and driving on Indian roads is more challenging than anything you can imagine. Sharing the bike-travel experience made it seem all the more special and valuable.

One of the first things we noticed was that the colors are getting brighter the further north we go. Peasant women especially, are increasingly resplendent in their dressing. Men too, although they wear predominantly white clothes, are also beginning sport deep crimson or flourescent green or pink turbans. View image. Also the ubiquitous Indian cows became more brightly colored, with flower decorations: View image, and even painted all kinds of designs by their owners: View image. I wondered when we would see our first camel...

After spending the night in Aurangabad, we headed out to see the stone carved temples of Ellora, one of the main historical attractions in India, only to find that they are closed on Tuesdays! We decided to keep moving, but to try and cover the 110km to Ajanta, another set of remarkable carved cave temples, to see them before nightfall, and continuing on our way north tomorrow.

The trip between them was a perfect mixture of country roads (i.e. no trucks or busses trying to kill us) and smooth surfaces normally associated with major highways. It was amazing to be travel in such proximity to the environment, looking into people's lives and homes, the smells of cooking and of the various plants growing along the road, and feeling subtle changes of temperature with every dip and shadow with pass over. We passed a large number of extraordinary temples which are dotted across the Indian landscape:View image. And as this was a cotton producing area, we saw it growing, being picked, transported on heads and scooters, and then bought and sold in towns. At one point, Nina jumped off the bike and onto the back of a lorry full of raw cotton, much to the amusement and delight of the local traders:View image

We got to Ajanta a few hours before sunset. The place is incredible, 26 cave-temples carved out of a solid rock face by Buddhist monks between the 2nd century BC, and the the 7th AD. Have a look at these photos: View image , View image , View image , View image , View image.

Here we also had our first intense experience of the celebrity status foreigners have in India. Being the only westerners at the caves, among hundreds of Indian tourists, we were asked 30-40 times to pose with people for them to take a picture of us. It became tiresome after a while, but we never refused anyone picture. Wanting to be good sports, and gathering good karma, and the right to photograph Indians without it feeling too exploitative or one-sided.
I imagine every tourist immortalized in India, pictured posing in hundreds of family albums all over the country.

By the next evening, we found ourselves in the next state northwards, Madihya Pradesh, we had seen our first camel (View image) and found ourselves on a seemingly impossible quest to get to Mandu, a fortified town we had heard about on the way. Mandu was once the capital of an Islamic kingdom has some of the most impressive Islamic architecture in India. The problem was that the road was so bad that we nearly got into trouble. Forget that this is national highway 79, and imagine a surface so bad that it takes 4 hours to drive 40 km, in first gear, out of one 4 ft deep pothole, and down into the next. It was HELL! View image , View image.
To make matters worse, this particular road is very remote, and as it got dark, we were stopped by a solitary car coming the other way; through sign language and broken English, it was explained that the road is notorious for its bandits, who rob those who are still on the road at night. Just as we are about to turn back, a lorry with armed policemen comes up behind us, they are patrolling for bandits, and agree to act as our escort if we want to continue to Mandu. Up for adventure, and dreading retracing all the distance we have just covered, we agree. Three hours later of first-gear night-riding over, around and through the potholes, we arrive safely, but exhausted, in the plateau walled-town of Mandu, at 9pm.

In the morning we visited several breathtakingly beautiful sultans' palaces, and it all seems worth the trouble. One sultan had 15,000 consorts and a bodyguard of 1000 abyssinian and turkish WOMEN. The palaces are built for pleasure, with two lakes and many swimming pools and bath-houses. It was so beautiful, that I found myself thinking about my father's career, and architecture in general, as a wonderful occupation. Here are some pictures: View image , View image , View image ,
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That evening, after battling more awful Madihya Pradesh roads, we stopped for the night within spitting distance of the border to Rajasthan, where everyone promised, well... a promised-land, repleat with PERFECT ROADS! The hotel where we stopped insisted on putting the bike indoors for the night, in their restaurant, even though there were people still eating as I drove it inside... View image.

The final day of the long ride to Pushkar:
As we entered Rajathan, it was true; the roads are wonderfully smooth and wide and safe!
Auto-rickshaws became even more strange than the vehicles further south: View image.

Seemingly covered in cement factories, southern Rajasthan was not very picturesque. But the building industry does seem to have an historical root; we passed this old-style brickworks by the side of the road, and could not resist stopping to take some pictures and have a laugh with the workers, who seemed to love their heavy labor, and thought we were hilarious: View image , View image , View image , View image , View image.

The further north we rode, the smoother and wider the roads became, until the same national route 79 which had been so awful, had become the fully-fledged four lane highway the maps had always claimed it to be. As camel sightings became more frequent, and the desert landscape became more evident, we kept passing stalls selling camel decorations, which truck drivers sometimes use to brighten up their already ridiculously festive lorries. I pulled over and got one stall to decorate the bike "a la camel", complete with tassles, fake flowers and tinsel hanging from every metal bar: View image , View image. We became even more of a popular hit with passing cars and trucks. And it geve us a feeling of success and celebration, as Nina and I rode into Pushkar, after six intense days of adventure on the road from Pune.

I had come over 1000 miles from Goa on the Enfield. It was sweet to think I could now relax and stay here and relax for a couple of weeks. For Nina it was a short lived arrival: she had to leave again the evening of the next day, on the train, in order to be back in Pune on Monday morning for her studies! But she loved the trip, saying it had been one of the most amazing experiences of her life, and that she felt she had seen more of India from the motorcycle in a few days, than during her whole previous three months in the country.