Pushkar camel fair

After leaving Jodhpur, I hopped on a bus towards Pushkar and its famous camel fair. It was...touristy. That's the best single descriptor I can think of. While I'm sure that lots of actual camel trading goes on in Pushkar, there are ten times as many touts selling things to tourists at rediculous prices. Prices for little paper-mache elephants would begin at 500 rupees, but if you showed no interest would drop as low as 10 rupees.

So, imagine 300,000 people decending on a town of 20,ooo for ten days out of the year. There are so many people they overflow the town into the surrounding dusty desert. Imagine a hundreds of thousands of camel showing up to be bought and sold. In addition to the camels, cows, horses and goats are all over the place. Now imagine walking through this dust-filled noisy environment surrounded by people selling things.

That was my experience of the Pushkar camel fair.