I have often seen pictures and heard about the famous Rat Temple in India. Its proper name is Karni Mata Temple and it is in Deshnok, about a half hour's drive from Bikaner. Our chance to visit came this morning and we left our hotel around 6:00 a.m. armed with determination, and for some, socks! The legend is that Karni Mata, a 14th Century incarnation of Durga, asked Yama, the God of death, to restore to life the son of a storyteller. Yama refused. Karni Mata reincarnated all daed storytellers as rats, depriving Yama of human souls. Its considered "auspicious" if the rats scamper over your feet. If you see a white rat, it means good luck. I imagined walking into a beautiful Hindu temple, with millions of beautifully shining black rats running around over our feet. Imagined it something like walking slowly through a seething mass of rats. Not so! The temple was small, not particularly special, and filthy dirty. The rats were small, mangy, infected little animals. They were cute, and did run around all over the place, but nowhere near the numbers I had imagined and none ran over my feet. A rat did jump into a shoulder bag carried by Anthony and he had to get help to get it out!! But that was the biggest excitement. We watched as Hindus came into the temple to pray. It is an important pilgrimage site for them and they come to pay their respects to the rats. They get food from the priests and then feed the rats and pray to them when they appear out of the myriad of holes to eat the food. It was marvelous to have the opportunity to see this Temple as you hear so much about it in the West, but in reality, we all agreed that it doesn’t have the “oooh” factor that we anticipated.
We drove back to the hotel and went to the Internet (it takes some time to do the posts on the blog, and we are trying hard to get some pictures up, but the Internet has been really slow. Ray did get some up on it, but don't know what happened, they are not there!). We left Bikaner around 12:30 p.m. and drove through the narrow country roads in rural India. We found a fabulous deserted fort on the top of a hill overlooking the most fabulous little village, but unfortunately, we couldn't get to the fort and couldn't find anywhere suitable to camp. Eventually, we came upon a fabulous stony plain at the foot of the mountain range and took the Truck over this until we found a nice sheltered spot away from the road. News travels like lightening! Before we were unpacked, abut 12 Indians were standing around in small groups just watching us. They don't say anything, they don't do anything, they just stand and stare. We had a fabulous pasta dinner, a couple of beers, and off to bed. Because of the location, we had to have someone on watch all night. Our shift was 5 - 6 p.m. We were lucky!! We left at 6:30 a.m.
Tonight was Aussie Sarah's 36th birthday, and Gemma made some delicious desert called "Tiffin", blew up balloons, and we all sang "Happy Birthday" around the fire.
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