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Published: July 18th 2006
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Whose up there
The men on top of our bus while at a stop.
Good Mango, bad germs. 3rd attempt at writing this...
these events are horrifically mixed up
Delhi- Rishikesh:
Horrible. Just Horrible. 4 hours we sat ina bus within Delhi(and it's heat) as we picked up random people in orange singing this "Bam Bam" song. All were headed to some festival we had no idea about. We finally left Delhi at around 1am with about 20 or 30 people on top of our bus singing and banging on the roof. I enjoyed this part though it could only be entertaining for so long. I didn't sleep at all, but that's normal night for me. Around sunrise the weather started cooling a bit and we headed into some dense forest though along the whole way many buses passed filled with orange crowds. We find out for sure that our bus really isn't going to Rishikish, but just to Haridwar about 30KM earlier and the roads are closed to buses now. We get off the bus around 6am and a group of us(3 israelis, 1 dutch, and 1 french) argue for an expensive taxi and finally get in. We pass the insane Ganges' banks which are filled with more people then I've ever seen, and all in orange.
2 Jews and French Dreads.
Crossing over to Lucksman Julah on arrival to Rishikesh. Why am I so happy?
Monkies. Apparently this festival also entails a good amount of happy people sitting on top of jeeps and lots of loud horns; I am learning this is normal.
We make it Rishikesh where we have more trouble getting around and we finally make it to the far corner of the town called Lucksman Julah and find a somewhat secretive guest house called Camal. We had a room right on the Ganges so the breeze was amazing but we soon found ourselves stuck in the strangest of areas where we were the only foriegners and the anywhere I went I was stared at horrifically. I had to sleep so I did and eventually later went out for a walk of the area and became afraid of the area and also dissapointed that this whole trip would be nothing.
We decided we'd try to find these so called waterfalls the next day so we set out the electric alarm clock that night in frustration, and hoping to wake up happily and ready. The morning was worse. The power went out less than an hour before our alarm was to go off and we woke up fairly late. I convinced Corey to
Corey is scared
Who hath wrath?
People or the Gods? go out for a bit, and he accidently locked me in the room on his way out. From there I do not need to continue to report that everything went severly wrong.
That's about all there is to say.
Stam!
But something be blessed, things did turn around a bit. We went to look for this mysterious beatles ashram(supposedly made by the beatles and maharisihi way back) which is out closer to the opposite forest and we get to this weird lawn area filled with gurus and strange men with distant eyes, we find a locked gate near by where some guy comes out and makes it obvious he wants money for entry. We had no idea what was up there and were not at all ready to pay our way into see some trees. But as we turned to go, along the trail came someone looking quite occidental and out of place. Our unbeknownst savior Michael of Kansas came also looking for the bealtes place. We all went ot the gate again and decided it wasn't worth it. Our Kansas(from Alaska actually) buddy told us that in High Bank, the
Night Bridge Rishikesh
Hey look! The power works. area way up top, has only foriegners there and no one else. We took the long walk back to the other side of the river and Michael took us to High Bank. We found internet, hostels, and everything(did I mention people?!) in a nice small...hot area. We went back to Luxman Julah for the night and slept(I tried at least).
The next day we woke up too late again in the heat, took our stuff and made our way to High Bank and found the best place ever. Big Mama's country cottage. A small family lives there with a couple crappy guesthouses, but Big Mama weighing in at maybe 60 lbs and being easily under 5 feet tall made up for size in politeness(and cheapness). We soon were meeting tons of Israelis and all sorts of folk to waste our time with and getting some good ideas. I also convinced not only myself, but Corey to try Yoga(2$ lesson) which wasn't really for begginers but we made it along. I had to do it just for the fact that Rishikesh is the yoga capital of the world, though I hear the ashrams are the best places. They are closed for the festival though.
We met another Alaskan in our hotel who is a martial arts master living in Nepal temporarily. The next day he took us to a less known waterfall(apparently all the main ones were full of the orange plague), and we had a nice long walk there through the ganges river valley where we ended up chilling for some time. And obviously some random Indian had to take my picture while I was there. I basically rested or the remainder of our time meeting the interesting folk (Raama, Da Dennis, israelis) who came to Rishikesh at so retarded of a time.
We decided just spur of the moment to leave Rishikesh and now we are waiting about 10 hours at the capital of Uttranchal: DehraDun for a bus. We need to find some extra money for our next trip and maybe you'll be hearing from us next from the Kinnaur Valley.
Best of Wok.
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Gregory
non-member comment
Sounds pretty awesome, aside from, well, all the bad stuff. How bad is the language barrier? Are there enough tourists, or is your guys' several word vocabulary enough to get you around? Ah well, I'll be checking for updates every few days, have fun.