Jaipur to Pushkar

150km.  Jaipur to Pushkar.  Just me, my bike, and the open road.  After 30min I begin to relax as I learn to share the highway with the overloaded trucks, speeding cars and the occasional sputtering rickshaw.  After 1 hour my bum is completely numb and I decide to stop at a roadside stand to refuel on chai.

A couple hours into the trip and I've found a sort of rhythm and begin to take in my surroundings.  The scenery is expansive and dry.  I see sheep herders in their  red rajasthani turbans guiding their flocks.  I pass a stretch where every kilometer has a dead, mummifying ox on the side of the highway.  Their corpses twisted in the heat.  Then a sleek black SUV speeds past and I glimpse a sadhu with his bare chest and bright orange robes, hair matted and caked with mud, sitting in the front seat one arm casually hanging out the window. I imagine him singing along to a Beach Boys tape.

Another chai break and then more highway, more desert, more sun... Suddenly a mango is jostled loose from the back of a truck that appears to be bursting at its seams.  The mango flies through the air bounces once and then shatters into bright orange shards in the middle of the highway a hundred meters in front of me.  I have plenty of time to swerve and swear I can smell a hint of its sweat juicy pulp as I speed past.

I turn off the highway onto the Pushkar road, small, winding and empty except for a few sheep.  I have a  flashback to 15 years ago when I last visited Pushkar, most likely driving down this same road.  I was 13 and it was my first trip to India with my family.   Now I'm back...with a bike.  150km from Jaipur to Pushkar.