Originally we didn't want to go to Rishikesh because we were really waiting for Delhi and all, but then my friend Ryan explained to me in the end of the vipassana training that Delhi sucks but Rishikesh is The Paradise. So what could I do, I believed him and we all went to Rishikesh with Ryan (Melbourne, Australia) and Alex (Montréal, Canada). Ryan showed us the coolest place in the area, where the hotels are cheap and the scenery is great, so we quickly took out a wonderful double room with Judit.
Our place was so cool that we even had a kitchen we could use, so one morning Judit surprised me with a wonderful omelet! :) I think I didn't eat an omelet since Bulgaria, and Judit made it so delicious, with tomatoes and onions and everything. Yummy. That cooking school was definitely worth it. :)
So what is this Rishikesh? Rishikesh is a small town in the Himalayas, famous of its yoga centers, the Ganga (Ganges) which flows through it, and because the Beatles spent a few months here in the sixties when they wrote the White Album.
The city itself lies in the valley of the Ganga, on both sides of the river, with several beautiful hanging bridges above the river, and lots of nice Hindu temples. In the area there are also some naturally beautiful places: waterfalls, crystal-clear rivers (which then all join into the dirty Ganga), forests and well, these mountains, being in the Himalayas...
We spent 7 days here, in great calmness: we sat a lot on our big balcony with our Israeli neighbor and with the bugs with blinking asses. In Rishikesh everybody is either Israeli or has a blinking butt. Okay, the Indians are exceptions but otherwise really there are basically only Jews. And these bugs. They are really strange; we noticed them in a night when we saw a blinking light on a tree. Then soon we spotted the others, closer and closer, and finally we found one on our balcony, too, so we examined it and determined that its ass is really blinking. What kind of insects do you readers think these are? I knew there existed some bugs with a light but I thought those were constantly lit up. We saw one which was constantly lit up, in a forest on a night, after climbing over a big fence of some ashram, but I think that was rather a one-eyed leopard or something. Whatever.
Also I spent 1-2 days in an Internet cafe, to finally write some articles for the blog. During this I had a surprising experience: I was told to sit down to a table, which was also the reception desk for a massage saloon. For 8 hours there was not a single soul coming for massage, but on the other side of the desk there was the receptionist lady sitting, and believe or not, for 8 hours she was just staring in the nothingness in front of her. But literally, just sitting and staring the whole day. I already got used to the Indians not striving for efficiency, but spending one's life doing nothing (okay, for sure once in a while someone would come for massage, but still), this shocked me pretty much.
Anyway, I'd like you to feel the atmosphere of the city so I made a gallery for you. It's 56 pictures so it'd take about 5-6 minutes to see it. It also contains some wild pigs enjoying a trance party:
