Risky-kesh
- Jul 14, 2016
- 3 min read
The night train was a bit of a surprise. The train station was awful, lots of people staring and asking for photos, so we hopped on board as soon as possible to get some peace. We were in 3rd class A/C, which meant there were three tiers of beds, we got the bottom two and settled in for the night. A friendly (and noisy) Indian family took the four beds above us and the father proceeded to welcome us to India, then fall asleep and snore with a sound like a chainsaw in a steel pipe. Greg tried to shake him awake at one point but he didn’t even open an eye. So continues our lack of sleep on Indian transport.
The other surprising thing about the train was that fresh linen was brought through in brown paper packages from the dry cleaners for us to get more comfortable, I thought we’d be roughing it on the plastic beds so that was quite nice. Final point about the trains: the train never announced what station we were arriving into. We were scheduled to arrive at 7:45am, I was awake since 5am looking for platform signs to give me a clue where we were.
We got to Haridwar at 8:15am, found our driver about 9:30am and set off for Rishikesh, yoga centre of the world. Back into the mountains, but only at 900m above sea level rather than 3500m this time. The surroundings are beautiful, nestled around the Ganges it is holy city so serves no alcohol. It was made world famous when the Beatles came here to spend time in an ashram, basically a yoga and meditation boot camp, apparently they wrote most of the White Album here.
There is definitely a more laid back feel in Rishikesh compared to other cities. We walked across the river to find the main traveller hub we were expecting and spent some time wandering around the stalls and looking for cafes recommended in Lonely Planet. The best restaurant was called Little Buddha Café which had a treehouse feel to it and overlooked the river. It was a great place to sit and people watch, or just watch the sun go down.
My favourite place by far though, is a café called Pure Soul and it’s been our sanctuary in Rishikesh. Everything here is amazing, we’ve actually gone there so much they give us a 10% discount for being regular customers. Brilliant coffee and cake here too, makes me miss Kate because even she would enjoy it here!
Anyway, time to explain why I called this post Risky-kesh. Matt arrived! That’s not the risky part though. Greg’s friend Matt joined us and so to welcome him to India we all went to Jumpin’ Heights, home of India’s highest bungee jump! Matt and Greg went for the “Thrillogy” which includes the bungee, the giant swing, and the flying fox. I only went for the flying fox, a kind of zip wire with a top speed of 140km/h.
Photography and filming were strictly prohibited, so I hid in a bush across from the jump platform and ot these videos (apologies for the terrible commentary):
The giant swing involved jumping from the same 83m platform, so the nutters did this twice. We also bought the official videos but they would take ages to upload, so you’re stuck with my crappy quality video for now.
After the bungee jump we were heading to an ashram for a week to get into the India vibe and find spiritual enlightenment. We lasted two days. One of those nights we snuck out to eat food containing garlic and onion (banned foods on the ashram). Not to complain, but the food was awful and the rooms had no A/C, meditation started at 5am and one of the yoga teachers shouted like a drill sergeant. Matt didn’t sleep a bit the entire time, so we moved to a lovely hotel close to Pure Soul and watched movies while we recovered from our two-day ordeal. It’s a hard life. The best bit about the ashram was the family of monkeys that played outside our rooms:
So it has been two weeks of relaxing in Rishikesh, we’re looking forward to moving on and starting our whirlwind tour of Rajasthan. First though, we return to Delhi and see if we judged it too harshly when we first arrived. I doubt it though…
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