After leaving Varanasi, we headed to Delhi for a few days before turning north toward Rishikesh. Since we came back to Delhi after Rishikesh, and we didn’t do a lot because I was sick with some sort of food or water poisoning during the first stay in Delhi, I will just sum up Delhi in one post after Rishikesh.

We expected Rishikesh to be a relaxing place to chill out for a week or so in the foothills of the Himalayas. It is a town on the Ganges river known for being the yoga capital of India, and attracts lots of hippies who travel to India for life changing mind blowing experiences. We were less than impressed.

We think the weekend we ended up in Rishikesh was just the busiest possible weekend to go. It was the last weekend for river rafting before rafting was stopped for the monsoon season, and was supposedly one of the last weekends before the rain started. It was also a few days before the river Ganges/Ganga goddess’s birthday – if you go into the river on this certain day, you are washed of 10 sins. So TONS of Indian tourists flocked to town to get in their last trip of the year. 

It was so busy in town. Unlike Delhi, there didn’t seem to be anywhere to escape the loudly honking cars/motorbikes, and the streets were crowded, so the vehicles had to honk even more to get through. The town is split across the river, win two footbridges to cross back and forth that were always full of people and also motorbikes trying to cross on the crowded, 3 foot wide suspension bridges. Walking the streets was necessary to get around, and obnoxious at best.

The first evening we arrived after a way too long 6.5 hour/200km bus ride and fought our way across the bridge to our hotel with all our stuff, and settled in before heading out for dinner. We found a cheap, simple and relatively tasty restaurant nearby called Purple Dhaba that had pretty good food, though not much to write home about. It was all vegetarian, since the whole town is veg and it is illegal to eat meat there (or drink alcohol, unfortunately, even though people smoke weed like fiends all around town..), so we had dal and a paneer dish with naan, and our favorite, mango lassi.

The next morning we had brunch at the Little Buddha Cafe, with lovely views of the river and a way too extensive menu of fairly boring food.

After eating, we wandered around town for a bit before we got way too hot, it was over 100 degrees out.

In the evening, we are again at Purple Dhaba and had the thali, a combination dish with dal and paneer.

The next morning we ate again at Little Buddha before setting off for the other side of town, and the Beatles ashram, where the Beatles stayed for a few months meditating and writing the White Album. On the way we stopped at another ashram, a place for meditation and yoga, that had a cool breeze by the river.

The Beatles Ashram was next, it was actually in a quiet location but it is no longer used and fairly fun down. There are artists painting the inside walls of some of the rooms, but they aren’t fixing up the buildings or anything, so we didn’t think it was worth paying the $20 for the two of us to go in. We could see most of it from the outside anyways, and Google the painting pics:

After all that walking in the heat, we spent the rest of the day cooling off in the room, eating again at Purple Dhaba with some hippies that seemed to think they know everything about life, and booking our way out of this relatively boring town – we decided a week would be way too much and that we can just spend the rest of our time in Delhi. 

At night, we met a guy leading meditation on the roof, and we participated. It was pretty cool, he was using a Tibetan singing bowl and put it on our heads at one point, only Thom wiggled a bit and it fell off his head, making a huge loud crashing noise (kind of like dropping a cymbal). But overall, quite relaxing aside from our inability to sit cross legged on the hard ground for long periods of time. 

The next day our bus ride back to Delhi took 9 hours for the same 200km drive, and once we got back, we were very glad to be done with taking the bus in India.