Hotel Ganga Kinare Rishikesh

... Phoolchatti Ashram, which lies on the banks of the river and is a nice spot for lunch. On the way we visited 2 waterfalls. The first was only 20 minutes off the main road according to a local lady, who told us the way as long as we bought some stuff from her shop on the way back. 2 hours later we reached the top of quite a large hill after walking through the jungle where we saw snakes, gorrillas, tigers ...

... traffic which meant that in parts where there was only just enough room to pick a way through for one vehicle at a time. The ability to amazingly miss an oncoming vehicle is something that transcends from the city to the countryside also and so when we arrived at our destination we were more than relieved to have avoided joining the wrecks at the bottom of the 500 metre sheer drops on the way!<br><br>We had a 90 minute uphill steep hike to our camp and just as we ...

... lot of Indian music such as the flute, table, and sitar. It was 200 rupees to enter, but we all thought it might be interesting to check out, so we went over to where it was supposed to be and found ourselves looking into a room with about five people sitting on the floor watching a recital for kids. And apparently the dancer was sick today. This did not seem worth it, so instead we went to watch a pooja ceremony from one of the ghats, and I really enjoyed this ...

Arriving in Rishikesh, yoga capital of the world, three buses and nineteen hours later after leaving Manali, the only thing our bodies were ready for was dinner and then a long sleep. Traveling in the north of India is a slow, grueling and sometimes demoralizing experience and what looks to be a fairly simple journey can turn into one of epic proportions. Rishekesh is close to the source of the mighty Ganga and this was our first taste, not literally, of India's ...

... 9...9! He swept them all up for me (sometimes men are just so good to have around!) we waited again....another four came coughing out of their respective holes.. we continued waiting. All in all there were about 20 or so in my room. What to do? Change rooms? Mine might be the only clean one! By about 1am they seemed to be all gone. The massacre concluded, I decided to suck it up and sleep there. I must say, I was very proud of myself. I really wanted to get over this irrational fear, I ...

... This makes our yoga teachers very happy as they know we are completely pure-after a week of our morning cleanses we have gotten out any impurities we might have ingested previously and are not able to ingest any new ones! 7:30 pm: Evening lecture...we learn about many different aspects of yoga-the different chakras (energy centers), yamas and niyamas (forbiddances and recommendations) which includes non-theft, non-voilence, truthfulness, cleanliness, non-possessiveness and a few ...

... next! Unfortunately, we didn't get to ride on elephant back and hunt for tigers as we had hoped...it seems the elephants are endangered and so that was stopped. It was all fine though...the jeep was still fun, REALLY cold in the morning, but nonetheless fun! We saw many deer, boars, birds, peacocks, monkeys, and jackals. No tigers or elephants (we did see paw prints and tons of poop)...but ...

... day before!) I will always cherish our crazy road trip to Agra with the traffic, music, and conversation (difficult though it was at times with his broken English and my extremely limited Hindi). On the way we picked up another travel rep (whose name unfortunately escapes me) and we arrived at the train station with plenty of time for my 7.10a train to Haridwar which ends up being 10 minutes late anyway. A long distance Indian ...

... curry for breakfast takes a little getting used to. The lush gardens and walkways, the clean, tranquil courtyards, huge ancient trees and religious iconography all create a space in which to rest the ego and float a while and despite the cowshit, motorbike horns, viciously cute monkeys and flies I'm starting to appreciate their way of living.<br><br>Eventually we settled into the routine of relaxing by crisp, pale blue waters of the ganges on the sandy ...

This leg of our journey has been restful and rejuvenating. We are ensconced in a tidy little guest house amongst a quiet little neighborhood high up on a bank overlooking the ganges and the communities along the river. With Jesse recovering from his fever we are staying close to home walking to the internet café, the 3 little restaurants and yoga classes in our neighborhood ...