Going to North India and finding ourselves back in Israel?

Rishikesh – arouse your chakras, baby

So we traveled 5 hours in a very nice air conditioned train and we reached Haridwar, in Uttarakhand state, on the foothills of the Himalaya in northern India. The city is by itself an important pilgrimage city for Hindus little, but a little too hectic stop for us on our way to Rishikesh. So we took a one-hour local bus and a 20-minutes autorickshaw and we arrived in Rishikesh, the former retreat city for the Beatles and the first Israeli colony in the north. To give an idea of the amounts of Israelis, think that we witnessed Israeli people seeing friends from school by chance. In my case, I ran into my brother’s (Israeli) ex-girlfriend on the street!

 Every restaurant has virtually the same menu that presents first of all Indian food, but also Israeli dishes like humus, tahini, shakshuka, fatut and even ethnic Israeli food that I’ve never eaten like ziva. Those menus also include the classic Indian distortions of Chinese, Italian and Mexican dishes.

The tourist area spreads on both sides of the Ganges river around Lakshman Jhula street and on the High Bank (also called the Swiss Cottage); in those areas you’ll certainly hear Hebrew and see the local fauna: after-army-smoking-charas Israelis (for the sake of the truth I have to say that the ex doesn’t get into this category) that spend days (or weeks) drinking chai in the local restaurants and doing the same thing: talking loudly about the army, of course, and smoking charas, of course.

Anyway, the scenery was interesting, the weather was slightly cooler and the city streets were slightly quieter: we didn’t have to put pieces of toilet paper in our ears as earplugs like we did in Varanasi and Delhi to bear the noise. In fact autorickshaws aren’t allowed in large parts of the Rishikesh.

Sikh people invaded by monkeys

We took antibiotics that we happened to have there (prescribed by my doctor-mother), and finally we started feeling better from our travelers-diarrhea. So we walked around, we saw the sad water falls and many monkeys. We also did our mii-pilgrimage to the now-closed Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's ashram, where the Beatles once got high and got inspired to do more beautiful music. I think it’s an exquisite building on the top of a quite park where sadhus (half naked guys who leave behind all material attachments) hang out and do what they excel in doing –nothing, but a mystical nothing. Sadly, the building is abandoned in the growing vegetation and even though it’s picturesque, it seems that soon will disappear into oblivion.

Sadhus doing nothing

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's ashram

Rishikesh is a mostly vegetarian and an alcohol-free city and it supposed to be the “world capital of yoga”. Since we did yoga for the last two years, we thought it could be a good place to take some classes. We did a long walk visiting ashrams (roughly, yoga schools that provide accommodation, simple meals and of course yoga lessons) trying to find something adequate.

But they were either too serious, I mean, you had to register months in advance or you had to stay at least 2 weeks; or they were a joke: a regular hotel but with an ashram sign.

We visited the famous Parmarth Niketan Ashram at Swarg Ashram area; but the place was far from relaxing and inspiring retrospection. It was a very busy and loud place where we heard a long and loud speech in Hindi from speakers everywhere. There we met a Western girl who gave us a new-agey brochure of Trika yoga. But we resigned and preferred to try the yoga classes promoted by our hotel (which in fact was the same class promoted by every hotel in the Swiss Cottage) than going all the way to the lower bank to try that.

Iohi peeked at a class, the young teacher didn’t inspire us too much confidence but the following morning we participated anyway. It was a rather mechanical slow-paced hatha yoga class word-by-word and movement-by-movement exactly like the one she saw the previous day.  

We didn’t want to take classes there anymore and we decided to give a try to the Trika yoga, it included morning and afternoon yoga lessons and some evening discussion. So the following morning we did the 40 minute way to Swarg Ashram area and found the school. The teacher was called… Yuval! (if you didn’t get it, he was Israeli!). The class was ok, a little too much arouse your chakra stuff, and extremely slow-paced, but he was an interesting teacher. And in the shavasana state, the final relaxation, we were completely high (and only from the class).

The afternoon class was led by a Mexican girl, who didn’t even present herself. Her class took the meaning of mechanical to a whole new level: she seemed like a videotape (yes, DVDs are less mechanical than her). It was awful, she was completely disconnected from  what was happened in front of her, and, actually, she did the whole class with her eyes closed!

Afterwards, she gave a class about the do’s and don’ts of the way of the yogi. There she presented pearls of Hindi wisdom like: if you do yoga half a day and the other half you torture kittens you won’t achieve balance. Or more realistic examples such as: if you do yoga six hours a day and then you’re bad with your husband and you mistreat your children and you eat ice cream, you won’t achieve balance. She kept presenting very adequate and relevant choices like either eat ice cream or do yoga, until we couldn’t take it anymore and we left.

Shimla – the toy city

The following midday we took a train from Haridwar to Chandigarh, spent the night and then traveled one hour in a crowded local bus to Kalka. There we took the cutest narrow-gauge toy train to Shimla in Himachal Pradesh state. It was a cool trip, passing through more than one hundreed tunnels and lots of retro stations as the little train creeps up through the mountain.

The city is a hill station, a cute and clean city with British buildings and it’s filled with monkeys! It was the summer capital of British India; in fact the British ruled India most of the time from there since it was cooler than Calcutta. It’s a rather expensive city (for Indian standards), but the city is very clean (for any standards): it’s forbidden to litter, to smoke in the streets, to spit and to sell plastic bags. And this works. The no-cars policy for the tourist area and the fact we were in some kind of shoulder season make it a perfect spot for relaxing.

Sadly, as the train went up I started to develop the symptoms of flu and I got there completely feeling like shit from fever. And in the following days I got the whole package: diarrhea, cough, tiredness. I spent most of the time at bed.

Iohi (besides looking after me) went in one occasion uphill to see the Jakhu Temple, dedicated to the monkey-god Hanuman. The way was packed with monkeys that learned to ransom items for food. They specialize in glasses and phones, but the locals tell that once they even robbed a baby! When Iohi was near the temple, one of the monkeys jumped over her backpack and took a bag of chips. Then some minutes later another monkey jumped over her and took her glasses, and she had to exchange it for an apple! Locals told her to take them off because the monkeys will continue to harass her. So she went on without glasses hugging her backpack and got attached to a French group that seemed a better prey for the monkeys. She finally saw the blurred temple (but she couldn’t tell me if it was nice) and went back to the hotel.

Manali –where we finally got better

When I felt slightly better we took a night “deluxe” bus to Manali. The deluxe bus was a very old bus with more or less reclining seats, it went up and did turns and more turns and I got completely dizzy. Every time we managed to fall asleep, the bus stopped for like 30 minutes and all the lights were turned on!

So we got to the noisy new Manali and we could choose between two satellite towns: the small Old Manali or the smaller Vashisht. Since we were already out of season, we opted for Old Manali. We found ourselves again in a second Israeli outpost. Everything had a translation in Hebrew or some writing assuring to Israeli compatriots that the shop had the best sandwiches or the best cakes. The clothes shops there sell a variety of hippy-colorful-shanti-rastafari clothes that people in India don’t wear at all and are tailored for, guess what, Israelis. It was cold there and I bought a long sleeved t-shirt and the store-owner assured me that the cut was exactly as Israelis want.

Right outside Manali

Old Manali is even closer to the Himalayas than Rishikesh and Shimla and it’s located on green mountains with small rivers and waterfalls. The view from there should be beautiful, but there are so many shops, guesthouses, restaurants, tourist agencies which sell exactly the same that the view is completely buried.

This time Iohi got the same virus I had before with her round of fever, cough and diarrhea. We stayed for almost a week until we both recovered: I broke a record with 20 days diarrhea, I think I almost vanished.

When we felt completely ok we started to look for a trek around, and after so many days of inactivity we prepared ourselves with a couple of days of yoga. We found the only classes in a guesthouse up in a small hill where workers of the places presented us with utter respect the guru.

So for the next couple of days, we woke up early and climbed the mountain to meet our bearded yogi guru. And we prepared our recently healed bodies with super fast-paced hatha yoga!

We tried to do a trek by our own, but around Manali there are huge marihuana plantations. Marihuana farmers seem not to be the kindest type of person and we read everywhere that you shouldn’t trek without a guide. The thing is that tourist agencies force you to take a cohort of a guide, a cook, a helper for the cook, a guy to take care of the horses and a guy to help the guy who takes care of the horses! And they won’t let you go with less people! So it’s expensive and we found it rather stupid to have more helpers than trekkers.

A group of Spanish guys told us about Spiti Valley, a moon-like valley 6 hours from Manali, which supposed to be safe and easy. I found out about a home stay walking trail in some forums and we decided that it was the best option. On the next morning we headed that way in a local bus…

As always more photos in Iohi's picasa.