I like riding in rickshaws. They are noisy, spew pollution, they feel like you’re riding a lawnmower at warp speed, the drivers are unequivocally insane, and every second you are riding in one, you know that you are in India.

I like knowing that I’m in India.

Where but in India would you find a temple dedicated to holy rats? As the story goes, the Karni Mata temple 30km south of Bikaner, in Deshnok, is named after Karni Mata, who asked Yama –the god of death- to return to life the son of a grieving storyteller. Yama refused, so to deprive Yama of human souls, Karni Mata reincarnated all dead storytellers as rats (not sure if this helped the storyteller who was missing their son much), and there are thousands of them in this temple. It’s considered good luck if one runs across your feet or if you see a white one.

So, you can imagine my surprise when the rickshaw pulled off on this random dirt stretch and told us we were there, indicating a small and rather…pathetic…lone building.

[ngfilename filename='P1100757.JPG' float=center]

Ray and I knew that most people aren’t rat lovers like we are, so maybe there wouldn’t be hordes of other backpackers clamoring to see the rat temple (or traveling 8 hours just to do so like we had), but we also knew that this is supposed to be an important pilgrimage site for Hindus. So we were a little confused by the complete dearth of other people. After we’d removed our shoes and walked inside, we were even more confused by the complete dearth of, well…rats.

There were three of them.

And they were all white.

And one came running right up to my foot.

We looked at the rickshaw driver. We looked back down at the rat. The white rat. One of three. This was SO not what I had envisioned. We repeated to the driver, “This is the Karni Mata Temple?” Yes yes, Karni Mata. We had been driving about 30 min…ordinarily, this might be enough time to cross 30km, but for as much as I like riding rickshaws, seeing as how every vehicle going in the same direction had passed us going twice as fast, I was skeptical. I looked back down at the rat sniffing my foot. He was white, and he was about to run across my foot but…I wasn’t feeling particularly auspicious. I was feeling like maybe this guy underestimated our dedication to the rat temple – I knew they were supposed to look like Smokeys and this little guy definitely did not. And I was pretty sure there were supposed to be a hell of a lot more than THREE. We’d had almost that many in a hammock back at home in Tucson, after all. We didn’t travel 8 hours out of our way to be scammed out of our rat temple.

There’s always the possibility that it was an honest mistake. That he thought maybe we had actually asked specifically to come to this one (?!). But omfg get back in the rickshaw you are taking us the rest of the 13 kms that we agreed on (as it turned out we’d only traveled 17 in that half an hour) to the REAL one. Lord you can’t trust anything as a tourist! We wondered how many people they got with this one and how many people went home wondering what the big deal was about the rat temple. “They’re all sleeping right now,” he’d said. Right.

So another half hour later found us in front of a MUCH busier, bigger, and rattier (in a good way!) temple.

[ngfilename filename='P1100759.JPG' float=center]

It was with great excitement that we finally passed the intricate marble carvings and the massive silver doors with the carved rats on them.

[ngfilename filename='P1100764.JPG' float=center]

We saw our first little brown ratties poking their heads out from around the doors, and then inside, YAY! The REAL rat temple!

It was awesome. It wasn’t the seething mass of rodentia that I thought would be blanketing the floor, but there were still tens of thousands of them throughout the complex, and it was certainly better than the three at the other place (cute as those were). The Hindu pilgrims came and got food to offer them, and there were big flat bowls of milk out for the rats. While the floor was (not gonna lie) fairly gross, I think that was largely owing to their winged-rat pigeon cousins that were also in abundance there, and the smell was definitely the milk, not the ratties.

[ngfilename filename='P1100830.JPG' float=center]

They were similar enough to our pets Biscuit and Smokey to make us happy, but different enough that we didn’t feel like we should just grab a couple and take them with us. We enjoyed the ratness for a good half an hour though, and they were sure adorable, running around and wrestling or snoozing in the strangest locations and funny, familiar positions.

Whether it would be worth the trip for everyone, I dunno. It might be just for the novelty. For us, it definitely was – especially since, fortunately, we made it to the right one!

[ngfilename filename='P1100828.JPG' float=center]

See all the ratties in the rest of the album of the (real) Karni Mata Rat Temple.