Getting a bit active in Rishikesh...

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Namaste,

Well it's been a while since my last post; mainly because I have been having too much fun in Rishikesh, but now I am back in smelly Delhi on the way to Varansi I thought I would have a bit of a write.

A lot of fun and interesting things have happened in my ten days in Rishikesh (told you it would be hard to leave).

As you may or may not know Rishikesh (or more precisely laxmanjula) is situated on the river Ganges just as its leaving the foothills of the Himalayas and making its long journey into the bay of Bengal. The river at the point of Laxmanjula is fairly fast flowing and give rise to plenty of opportunities for watersports. Now being the adventurous fellow that I am I managed to persuade my new friends to join me for a spot of white water rafting. Usually these sorts of thing are expensive in most parts of the world but this is India and for the price of two pints of beer in the UK we got a full day, 27km rafting trip complete with breakfast and lunch... to say the least we were pretty pleased.

As already stated the day started with a drive 27km up river into the hills where we were given a rather large breakfast (in hindsight im not sure eating a lot before a rafting trip was such a good idea!). Our rafting guides consisted of two cheeky but enthusuastic Nepalese blokes who took great pleasure in yelling at us to paddle harder etc.

Onto the rafting... I must say it was probably one of the funnest things I have ever done; the stretch of river we rafted consisted of grade 3 and 4 rapids which were pretty exciting to be thrown over! The third rapid was aptly named body surfing in which our guides promptly pushed us into the river to feel the full force of the rapid with just our life jackets for buoyancy... I was in my element.

At the lunch mark we were joined by four Indians who had payed for a half day; the first experience they got of the rapids (and possibly a British person) was to see myself fall straight in on the first rapid. Needless to say it got them all laughing and talking to us!

We finally reached the end of the rafting trip with one more challenge reamining... a cliff jump into the river. Now for those of you that don't know me that well I am partial to a spot of cliff jumping and with no hesitation I promptly heading straight up the big rock and hurled my self (8m drop) into the river. I do have a video of this and i will try and up load it on here. In summary that day was probably the highlight of my trip so far.

Rishikesh is also famous for it's Yoga; now I know in the past I have knocked this 'actrivity' quite a lot... however I can now safely say it is bloody hard. I think the instructor sensed my lack of faith in his 'profession' and proceeded to try and make my body do things that I dont think a man can naturally do... all i can say is painful but eventually very relaxing!

Im afraid this post is basically just a long list of things i did in Rishikesh but bare with me!...


The Beatles came to Rishikesh back in the day (not sure when) to get away from the pressure of stardom in the west. They spent months in an Ashram in Rishikesh doing Yoga, mediatating and taking drugs; this eventually led to them writing alot of their material for the white album (im my opinion one of their best). The ashram itself has acutally been abandoned since 1997 when its owner had a dispute with the government and had to leave. Upon arrival the place does look quite derelict and is supposed to be free to enter. However some chancer on the door who had just bought a big padlock was trying to charge people money to enter. Not being a person who lies being ripped off I told him where to go and stick his padlock and walked around the complex until myself and my Irish friend alan found a part of the wall that was low enough to climb... no problems! The actual complex is now all overgrown however we did find a room where someone had painted a lot of beatles themed art work which was pretty good.


Now for the really active bit...

Im my last entry I wrote about the waterfall I climbed too (remember?); well a further 6 km from the waterfall is a temple on a hill where you can apparently see the snow capped peaks of the Himalaya from... as a bit of a mountain fan and geography geek it had to be scaled!

Unfortuately the mapping in India isnt as good as ours there is no equivalent of the OS map series etc; so we were trying to find this temple on the direction of local village people who didn't speak a lot of English.

Subsequantly we got lost and the whole walk in the end was around 15km... uphill.

Eventually we reached the temple t around 3 in the afternoon and what greeted us was breathtaking; the peaks in the distance floated on the horizon like the distant clouds of a weather front... definately worth the long long walk!

So thats pretty much it; as I type I am sat in a didgy internet cafe in Delhi awaiting a train to Varanasi tomorrow.

I hope you aren't all washed out at home; the floods sound bad!

Jack x

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Photos

Idiot in front of the Himalaya
The view from the top of the hill we climbed