After spending twelve days bouncing through Rajasthan at a breakneck pace, we decided we wanted to slow down our pace. After bouncing through so many towns and cities in Rajasthan, I was left with only scattered memories and photographs. By spending some quality time in a place, perhaps we would be left with a more lasting impression. All that remained then, was deciding which place that would be. After a few days of reading, we decided there was only one real option: Rishikesh.
Rishikesh is actually a collection of five small settlements all located next to the Ganges river. It's a holy place: Hindu pilgrims make their way towards the head of the Ganges, high in the mountains, in order to collect some of the water and bring it back to their homes. Walking through the smaller villages set next to the riverside, you are guaranteed to see flocks of people from all walks of life, walking barefoot and carrying small purple plastic bottles around their necks.
One of the five villages in particular, Swarg Ashram, was where we decided to stay, owing to its being set away from the hustle and bustle of another village, the backpacker haven, Laxmanjoola. Our plan was simple: to just arrive and find one of many hotels, and get a rate for the twelve days we would be staying. But I'm getting ahead of myself: we had to actually get to Rishikesh first. If you've been paying attention to these dispatches, getting around in India is anything but boring.
If you recall back to the Jodhpur entry of the Rajasthan trip, you may remember Mr. Bhandari helping me to buy a pair of second-class sleeper train tickets. There are a wide variety of ticket classes with India Rail, from individual, air-conditioned bedroom cars with linens and table service, to essentially travelling with the mail. It all comes down to how much discomfort you are willing to put up with, directly related to how much money you are willing to spend on train travel.
We arrived at the train station far too early, on the recommendation of pretty much anyone we talked to about trains. That was a fun two hours to spend in the dusty, grimy, train platforms, where too many people are standing around waiting. Our train was an overnight train bound for Haridwar, a larger city thirty kilometres south of Rishikesh, and from there you're supposed to get a taxi or bus or another connecting train. Leaving at ten o'clock at night, our train was scheduled to arrive at six in the morning. When we got to the train station several people offered to help us with our bags, and we had to practically beat them off with sticks to let us do it ourselves. Finding the line number was easy: finding the train was less so, but we did eventually realize that two trains were being combined into one, and one of them was ours. It's a surprising dichotomy: while the actual act of getting a ticket for a train is surprisingly complicated, once you have one, your name shows up on a printed list attached to the side of the train you're supposed to be on, and everyone seems to know exactly where you're supposed to go.
The interior of a second-class sleeper is not really designed for comfort, but for economy both of money and space. The bunk on which you are to sleep is five feet long, and they're stacked three high, two to a cubicle, for a total of six. Amy and I were allotted two of the top ones across from each other, and there's no place to store baggage: it goes up there with you. So we packed ourselves into our bunks and spent the next eight hours enjoying the local colour and not sleeping much at all. The temperature ranged from humid and hot to breezy and cold; the lights didn't turn off; people talked well into the night; two teenagers took turns walking up and down the aisle bellowing out the fact that they would sell you a cup of chai should you desire one.
It was an experience.
Stumbling out of the train at far too early in the morning, we followed someone who looked like he knew where he was going to find the bus terminal in order to catch a bus to Rishikesh. The term "bus terminal" in this case really means "area behind some street-front vendors where the ground is too muddy to build anything." Our bus ride to Rishikesh was as compact as our train ride to Haridwar; with no cargo room, your baggage goes with you, so Amy and I put both of our bags in our laps and felt every bump for the next thirty minutes.
We then chose to walk from the Rishikesh "bus terminal" towards Swarg Ashram, a mere two kilometres from Rishikesh town, on the other side of the river. The settlements on both sides of the Ganges are connected by two footbridges, at least five hundred feet across. These large suspension bridges are in constant use, crossed by people, cows, monkeys, as well as people on scooters and motorcycles, which honk their way across clearly ignoring the irony of crossing a footbridge on a motorized vehicle.
As we walked the distance, we had no less than twenty auto-rickshaws ask if we wanted or needed a lift, and that was when we stopped counting. I'd never seen an auto-rickshaw before arriving in India, so if you haven't as well, imagine taking a motorcycle, chopping off the back wheel and attaching a cart: now put walls and a roof over the whole contraption, paint it some of the gaudiest colours I've ever seen, and adorn it with religious paraphernalia. This is an auto-rickshaw, and riding in one can be an interesting experience as sometimes you even get to where you wanted to go. Other times, you don't, and you have to have an argument about who is in the wrong. On foot, you don't have these problems.
However you do have other problems, like getting lost, which is what happened to us. Despite there actually being a prevalence of signage indicating not one but too hotels that we wanted to investigate staying at, we couldn't find them. We circled the Swarg Ashram area for thirty minutes and didn't find it, and I got progressively grumpier. Finally I sat down with the luggage while Amy did some reconnaissance, and found the place we wanted: the Raj Palace.
There's not much to say about the Raj Palace other than it had a lovely restaurant, a great rooftop patio from which to watch the sun set, and they were willing to cut us a very nice deal for us to stay there for close to two weeks. The staff there were very attentive to detail and nice to chat with, so as a basic review of our stay in Rishikesh, it was great on that level.
Getting our room, we slept for the better part of the afternoon and had a great meal on the rooftop, complete with superior sunset. A nice way to start our stay. Yoga and meditation are big things in Rishikesh, with dozens of ashrams - spiritual retreats, if you will - having set up shop in the Rishikesh area. Our hotel is also great in that they offer yoga classes twice a day, at a reasonable rate: one hundred rupees for a two-hour session, which works out to about two dollars and fifty cents Canadian. We tried out both sessions on two different days, and while the morning session worked out well for our schedule, the teacher was starting a ten-day-long course, which wasn't going to work out for us. In the end this was just as well, as we found the evening teacher a bit more to our liking anyway. In the end I went for two sessions and Amy went for three, but as time wore on, the class became more and more popular to the point there weren't enough matts to go around, so we found other things to do to let new people have the yoga experience.
A brief word about yoga: if you've never tried it, I thoroughly recommend it. For the uninitiated, it's exactly what you think it is: stretching your body into various positions and holding these poses to give your body a good workout. The basic poses aren't terribly difficult to get into, but extremely difficult to hold for a long time, and at the same time your balance is tested as well, so you occasionally fall over. The advanced poses can leave your jaw dropping, but when you see the teacher do it as if it was no big thing, you realize that the human body is a lot more flexible than we usually give it credit for. The other great thing about yoga is that the workout is as difficult as you want to make it: if you can't do a particular position, you don't, or you go as far as you're able. I certainly couldn't do half of what the instructor did, but it was extremely heartening to learn that he'd only been doing it for ten years, and the flexibility does come.
We spent a lot of time with some new friends, Stéphanie and Julien from Switzerland, who we actually met back in Delhi. Turns out they were heading to Rishikesh as well, and we hooked up. S&J are on a world trip of their own, having been through New Zealand and Australia before coming to India. Given this was on our itinerary, and Rajasthan was on theirs, we naturally had a lot of notes to compare.
Hanging out with S&J was quite fun, as I found they have the same relaxed temperament as we do. Their trip is going to be a bit more interesting than usual, as they don't speak much English and they will be heading through several countries in southeast Asia, where the standby language is English. It was a fun time for all as we got heavy practice with our French. Stéphanie paid me the highest compliment by saying I spoke very well, and she could actually understand me better when I spoke French rather than English: I suspect it's because I try harder with French, and get lazy with English.
The four of us ended up hiring a local guide named Kalyan to show us around some of the mountain treks in the area. The first trek was a back woods hike, the principal goal of which was a large waterfall. We managed to get the whole way there and part of the way back when the clouds poured in and the rain poured down. Our second trek was a circuit up and across the mountain tops (I use the term "mountain" loosely here: I think our ascent was no more than 1000 metres). We got about an hour in when the rain started, and this time, it came down in buckets. It was the kind of rain that looked like it was just about to stop, and indeed, it did lessen at times, but on the whole the rain was there to stay for the next couple of days. There were dramatic views of fog over the mountain tops; there was great practice for trekking in Nepal. But by far the most entertaining part of the second trek was hanging out with Kalyan's uncle, huddled around the fire, drying off and drinking way too much tea.
On a day where it wasn't raining, we split up into gender-based teams and did gender-stereotyped activities: Julien and I hiked along the riverside, while Amy and Stéphanie shopped at pashmina stores. All I know about Amy's excursion was that she came back with some beautiful pashminas. As for Julien and I, it was... well, it was interesting.
We started up the left bank of the river with no fixed goal other than to see what was up there. After passing dozens of monkeys cavorting in the trees, and dramatic rock formations sticking out into the rougher parts of the Ganges (people actually do a fair bit of white-water rafting in the Ganges) we started getting into an forested area of the path that was well away from the villages. It was there that we met a guy who I would assume is a sadhu. A sadhu is a sort of spiritual hermit, although I am going to suggest that there are varying degrees of "hermit-ness," especially in Rishikesh. During a conversation with our guide Kalyan, he suggested there are actually very few true sadhus in the area, and the rest are simply beggars. When I asked him how I would be able to tell the difference, he replied, "a sadhu won't tell you that you should give him more money."
So, the sadhu Julien and I ran into didn't speak much English, and we didn't speak any Hindi, so it was a bit of sign language for a while. He seemed insistent that we shouldn't go any further up the path, but whether this was because he wanted to have us come back for tea and a smoke or because it was somehow dangerous, was something we'd never know. We went back to his house, set back from the river's edge. He introduced us to someone else who lived there, perhaps his older brother, who spoke as much English as the first. The first guy showed us around the house, with particular attention to his shrine devoted to Shiva: we all kneeled together before the idol, and he invited us to make a donation. Not being at all prepared for this cultural event, I of course had two types of monetary denominations at my disposal: very large bills and trifling small change. The small change was going to have to do. He made no bones about the size of the donation, which made me believe we had found the real deal of sadhu, and with a thumb dipped into the pit of ashes nearby the idol, put marks upon our foreheads. We shared some tea, threw rocks at monkeys trying to sneak into the house, and generally found absolutely no common ground or language with which to relate. In the end I took some portraits, and the first guy insisted on posing with a box of matches. I have no idea why. Julien and I headed back, joining up with our respective significant others for a meal and some story-sharing.
A brief sidenote while I'm remembering it: there were two guys running the front desk at the Raj Palace: Sundar, just about the nicest guy in his particular occupation you'll ever have the opportunity to meet, and another guy who seemed to be doing the job with as much enthusiasm as clipping ones' toenails. He paid us absolutely no attention, until I arrived back at the hotel with my sooty thumbprint on my forehead: he came to life, asking me where I got it, and the whole story was relayed. Rishikesh has a definite presence of non-Indian tourists, and I can imagine it gets a bit disheartening seeing your holy town turn into a tourist centre. So when someone takes on (or has forced upon them) a bit of the local colour, it must be a nice occurrence: kind of like a tourist taking the trouble to learn a bit of the local language, rather than insisting on using English.
Another thing we did in Rishikesh was to visit a Sikh temple. Our yoga teacher, Singh, is a devoted Sikh practitioner, and Stéphanie was interested to learn more about Sikhism. We all tagged along to visit the Sikh temple outside of town. There is a lot more to the tour that I don't remember than what I do, but it was all pretty fascinating and I'll try to relate the more salient bits here.
Essentially, the Sikh movement began hundreds of years ago before a particularly violent time in India's history: there were incursions of foreigners into one of the kingdoms, and this particular kingdom didn't have enough soldiers to mass an appropriate defence. With its population, which has always been pretty large, you wouldn't think there would be such a problem: but India's caste system proscribes only a certain segment of the population can be a warrior. Not anyone could just join up with the army. Enter Sikhism, which eschews the caste system completely in favour of general equality. The Sikhs formed armies, and repelled the invaders.
The spiritual arm of the religion is multi-theistic (if that's a word), integrating Hindu and Moslem figures into its mythology, and I'm assuming, the lifestyle principles to which they were agreeable. At first a Sikh guru oversaw the religious teachings of the movement: what they said, went. But as time went on, a particularly enlightened guru realized that what is right could be very subjective, and decided to take the best teachings and combine them into a text that could be the definitive record of Sikh belief. This was done, and remains their holy text to this day. The temple has a whole room devoted to the housing of a text: it even has its own bed, in which it lies.
Every day, Sikh volunteers prepare three meals, which are made available to anyone who is hungry, free of charge. When we visited we had lunch with them, consisting of rice, a curry, and some flatbread - all very delicious. I asked Singh if anyone ever took advantage of the free food, and he said that there were always exceptions, but eventually they got the message and contributed back in some way.
As the days whiled away in Rishikesh, I've already mentioned that the weather took a turn for the worse - the jade-green waters of the Ganges turned a muddy grey, but the streets were washed clean of all sorts of things you wouldn't want to step in. Our party of four would meet up for a meal and card games, where we traded the rules for Swiss and Canadian games, as well as scaring up some extra decks to play some Racing Demon. I can't recall if I've mentioned R.D. before, but if I haven't, it's essentially aggressive solitaire, with rules that are too complicated to mention here.
On Stéphanie and Julien's last night in Rishikesh, we decided that we would celebrate by ordering up lots of Indian food and perhaps thumbing our noses at the dryness of the city by finding some local booze to wash it all down with. Easier said than done. After our visit to the Sikh temple we embarked on our mission, which all the locals indicated could only be accomplished by taking an auto-rickshaw ride seventeen kilometres out of the city to the next village where they sold booze, presumably to the Rishikesh locals. Amy and I were curious to try some Indian wine, which by all accounts we've heard is uniformly terrible, and Stéphanie and Julien were game as well.
After haggling the price, the four of us embarked on our rickshaw journey. One other thing I didn't mention about auto-rickshaws is that they are incredibly noisy: the sound of the engine drowns out most attempts at conversation made at anything below the shouting level. When I tried to engage the driver in conversation (always good to keep them on your good side by being friendly) he invited me to sit up front: easier said than done, as there's really only room for one and a half people up there, but I went up, curious. It was more than a little dangerous, for as soon as I was up there, he couldn't turn the steering wheel (well, handlebars actually) all the way to the left, which gave us a near miss until I squeezed my body all the way to the left to give him more room. While it was an interesting experience, and a halfway decent conversation, it didn't stop me from taking up my seat in the back on our way back.
We did get to the village, whose name I forget, and its "English Wine Store." I figure, this is going to be the perfect place to find the wine we were looking for. Julien and I went over to the shop, which was charmingly set behind a steel grate, where the two patrons fulfilled the requests for bottles of alcohol with the most disdain I think I've ever seen in a shop. It's like these guys recognize that there's a local custom of sobriety, but no legal enforcement for it, and every bottle they sell comes with an equal share of scorn and distaste. I'm not kidding - when they passed over a bottle, it was literally dropped onto the counter behind the grate for the customer to reach through and pick up, after handing over their rupees.
I asked the guy behind the grate, what he had in the way of wine. "No wine," he said, "you want rum?" It turns out all the store stocked was beer and spirits: mostly local varieties, although Johnny Walker turned out to be a local favourite for some reason. Even in gin, not a bottle of Bombay Sapphire was to be found. For beer, no Kingfisher: just Amstel light and another American beer. This was not a shop for the connoisseur; for these folks, when people drink, it's for the specific and direct purpose of getting drunk. Not much more. As the guy I was trying to negotiate a sale with was feeding me scorn for trying to get drunk in his holy city, I was trying to give some shame back to him: for an English Wine Store, he had neither wine, nor anything English. He didn't seem to get the irony. We bought two overpriced bottles of beer and left.
The mediocre beer, surprisingly, went extremely well with the dishes we ordered back at the hotel: perhaps it's having been away from any kind of alcohol for weeks. We ate, we drank, we played cards. The next day we met up for breakfast and parted company, spending our own remaining hours in the returning sunshine as we awaited our own "deluxe tourist bus." For this how we had decided to return to Delhi for our flight to Nepal. At a price similar to a train ticket, this non-stop bus was going to get us there in style - at least, that's what the flyer advertised. When we actually arrived at the bus, we realized that style is relative and the bus we had envisioned was not going to be available unless we paid out some serious rupees. It was hot, it squeaked, but it wasn't overstuffed with passengers; it was a far sight better than our trip up. We got stuck in some of the worst traffic I've ever seen, and when it came to get out of the bus, we barely had time to get our bags and get off at the side of the highway before the bus drove off into the night.
An auto-rickshaw ride later, and we were back at the Rak International for the last time. Hungry for dinner, we decided on a meal, and this time I thought we could surely scare up an example of Indian wine to accompany it. This time, when asked in the conspiratorial tone if we would like some beer, we joined in the conspiracy and said yes - but in fact, we wanted some wine. One of the guys rushed out to find something. When he came back, sidled up to us, looked left, looked right, and then pulled a mickey of Johnny Walker red label whiskey out of his pants and palmed it over to me. Amy and I looked at each other and realized, this was probably not going to happen. I held the bottle back out to the guy.
"This isn't wine," I noted.
"It is rum," he observed, "very good. You drink in your room."
"I know it's rum, but we wanted to try some Indian wine," I tried.
"No wine. It is Friday."
"We don't drink rum," I confided, "if you can find us some wine, we'll drink that."
A look passed over his face: we were being picky about something that was clearly intended for one purpose only. It took a few more minutes, but he reluctantly took the bottle back, stuffed it down his shorts, and squirrelled it away somewhere upstairs. We still haven't had any Indian wine: perhaps we never will.
The next day we left early to catch our flight to Nepal. We knew we'd have to take a taxi, but I figure we're so well adjusted to Indian driving that this would be as familiar as an old hat. But India had one last surprise for us: fog. A fog so dense and thick that visibility was limited to about ten feet. Our taxi was no surprise for Delhi: a minivan, no seat belts, one working headlight. The driver took us careening through the city's highways with little regard to the weather, leading me to believe that he was using the force to navigate us to the airport. However we arrive without incident, not even a close call, and organize ourselves for our flight to Nepal.
The Indira Ghandi International airport is new, but it's still relatively small. With a limited number of security checkpoints and airplane departure gates, passengers must wait in the main lounge until they're signalled to go through security and board the plane. Unfortunately there's a huge number of passengers and a finite number of seats, so this leads to a lot of meandering around looking for an empty seat, like sharks hunting for a wounded seabird. In the end we overpaid for mediocre coffee and tea in a private lounge, and spoke with a New Zealander named Michael for the duration; he gave us some great tips about the south island.
The rest of this story isn't very interesting: I didn't lose anything in security, in fact, they didn't raise an eyebrow concerning anything in my pack, which is directly the opposite to all my experiences in Europe. Our flight was delayed by two hours (the fog did eventually lift) but we did get off the ground, and were rewarded with our first views of Nepal: while it was a cloudy day, the taller mountains spiked their way heavenward through them.
