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Published: November 26th 2007
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Rishikesh
Parmarth Niketan Ashram Namaste,
The next leg of our trip took us from Goa (Mid West India) to Rishikesh (North East India). This 24 hour "Pailinesque" journey involved 5 forms of transport and was incident filled.
Our internal flight from Goa to Delhi had to make an emergency landing at Mumbai due to an elderly passenger having a heart attack. Luckily there was an Israeli doctor who did her best to stabilize the man and with an ambulance ready as we touched down at Mumbai hopefully he was ok.
This caused a huge delay as we had to wait for a slot to take off again. Luckily the November edition of Spice inflight magazine offered some ‘Things to do when bored on a plane’.
• Ask the stewardess if you can have some tape and when she asks why say ‘its for my device’.
• Go to the pilot and say that guy with the machine gun looks suspicious.
• Read magazines that show you how to make bombs and laugh in an evil way.
• Sit in the crash position and when someone asks you what you are doing say ‘waiting’.
These were genuine suggestions mixed in with
Rishikesh
Sarah ringing a holy bell in a Temple some inappropriate sexist jokes and some very questionable Trivia ‘facts. I’m sure 1930 world cup final ball wasn’t made of monkey skulls wrapped in paper and leather?!
Anyway we opted instead for reading our books and eventually we landed in Delhi. After the calmness of Goa it was a bit of a shock being thrown into a rubgy scrum of a queue attempting to get a taxi. We soon gave up on our English attempts to form a queue and tutting at those who didn’t conform, sharpened our elbows and leapt into a moving rickshaw.
We boarded our night train, found our sleeping berths and got some sleep while our train trundled towards Dehradun. An early morning bus ride took at to Rishikesh and here we are in the foothills of the Himalayas in the self labeled ‘Yoga capital of the universe’.
The setting is beautiful, placed in a valley with mountains all around us and the holy Ganges flowing through the middle. People come here for two reasons either on a Hindu pilgrimage to bathe in the Ganges and worship in the temples or to find inner calm through yoga, meditation, pranayama, reiki, holistic treatments and
Rishikesh
Andy received a Hindu blessing aveydic medicine. The Beatles made a famous prolonged visit in the 1960’s to ‘find themselves’ and in the process wrote the White Album.
Many people who come here stay in Ashram’s, live a really simple life and dedicate a month or more to spirituality.
Although we are not staying in an Ashram we have booked a 6 day course which involves early morning yoga sessions and afternoon meditation. I will never again say that yoga is a lame form of exercise which girls do instead of putting in some effort and going for a run. Its definitely proved to me that you don’t need to sweat to have a good workout. I have found some of the moves very hard, with the inflexibility of my legs and lower back making my reach extremely limited. If it wasn’t for the pained expression on my face you wouldn’t even think I was trying as my hands barely pass my knees let alone my toes.! Sarah is faring much better and is definitely top of the class. (its only me and her!)
Anyway we have both improved a lot during the week ( I can nearly touch my shins!) and
Rishikesh
Laxman Jula Bridge we are finding the breathing and relaxation which goes with it really beneficial. We have both enjoyed the course and will definitely continue practicing the yoga positions after we have finished.
The meditation course has shown us different ways to relax, to empty our heads of thoughts (harder than it sounds) and attempt to unite our consciousness and supreme consciousness. This consists of different ways of breathing and Om chanting.
We also learnt the ‘dance technique’ this involved standing in a small dark room with our eyes closed and listening to a CD which was a mix between Enya, Mike Oldfield and Pink Floyd. We then had to feel the music inside of us and become the music and dance! I opted for some Bez style moves, I think Sarah was pretending to be a tree floating in the breeze with memories of her theatre studies A level flooding back. (how is that a proper A level?)
After 1 hour and without wanting to sound too much of a hippy, we really enjoyed it and found it very liberating. I tried to imagine if offices in London tried a similar technique to help relieve stress to employees.
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Huge 'wedding cake' Temple But maybe you need to be bare foot, wear Levellers style trousers and feel the breeze of the Ganges through the window for the full effect.
Aside from this we fill our days sitting in cafes or on the banks of the Ganges people watching and reading. All the action occurs on the river with an impressive nightly Hindu Aarti ritual which involves joyful singing, clapping and celebrations followed by the lighting of tea lights in baskets of flowers which are then sent down the Ganges.
Its also a great place to view individuals practicing yoga moves with much more impressive show of flexibility and strength than us and hoardes of visitors bathing in the cold waters of the Ganges hoping to soak up the healing powers it offers.
We also have a new alarm clock. Monkey’s - they seem to think it’s a great game to run up and down our railings outside our hotel room, screeching good morning. Its amazing seeing so many monkeys at close quarters and you could spend ages watching them leap around and misbehaving!
I have developed beard envy. After a few weeks of attempting to grow facial hair (and
Rishikesh
The holy Ganges being quite proud of my patchy stuble which is slightly top lip heavy) I am now face to face with some of the most impressive beards I have ever seen. Every other man looks like God.
My patchy beard hasn’t stopped us from being tourist attractions. We get stopped everyday as we cross one of the two impressive bridges by Indian tourists keen to have their photo taken with us!
Sorry we still haven't got any photos on the blog (the ones on the Goa page were photos I had found on the internet and not actually our own!) but no where allows us to upload them something to do with broadband limitatiions. We will keep trying and when we get to Phil's place in Oz we will definately add them in that's if we can't get them before.
Hope you are all well we are off up into the mountains and will up date you soon.
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john williams
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Monkeys
Being woken up by monkeys is a chilling reminder that Matt's just lived at home for four months!!