I’m not sure if any trip to India would be complete without a trip to see the sacred Mother Ganga – otherwise known as the Ganges River.  With our flight to Kathmandu just a week away, Helen and I made a four day stop into Rishikesh to do a bit of rafting, take a yoga class, and enjoy our last week of Indian cuisine.

Rishikesh is a really bizarre town - truly unlike the other Indian towns we have been in; even the Indians come here for a vacation/pilgrimage and a chance to take in the atmosphere of ashrams and temples.  After a truly hellacious trip on the overnight train (I ate the street veggies in Dharamsala…enough said) we left the train station and were greeted by the fantastically blue-green waters of the Ganges.  All I’ve really ever heard about the Ganges is largely negative; Indian literature portrays the Ganges as a festering gray slush with feces, filth, and the ashes of dead bodies clogging the banks of the river.  I have to say, I was surprised to see the heart of Rishikesh lying on the other side of the sun-glinted blue river, over the pedestrian bridges, and in an area of town where motorbikes and push carts are the only transportation options clogging the streets.

Rishikesh is essentailly the first place that the sacred Ganges exits the mountains and enters the plains of India – and more specifically, the water has not yet reached Varanasi where riverside cremations and funeral pyres create the slushy gray effect that then flows down throughout the rest of the country.

This town is the Yoga capital of the world and Helen and I opted to take a nightly free meditation class offered by the Cultural Center – the class is led by a Yogi guru and assisted by a team of pubescent girls who circle the room like vultures over a kill, adjust your position and patiently shove your body deeper into postures.  It’s a bit intimidating to seem them flawlessly bending themselves into these deep back bends and the such – but even so, we were both comfortable with our own level and it was really great to have a way to get a great free workout in the evenings.

We especially needed the yoga class after our rafting trip down the Ganges.  Because the river is so clean this far north, the Ganges is a viable rafting magnet.  The rapids are three to four grade rapids this time of year and it was pretty budget-friendly to take a morning rafting trip down the river.  Besides Helen and myself, there were four others in our raft – a group of Indian guys from Delhi vacationing for the weekend.  They were a lot of fun, if not the best paddlers.  There were points where Helen and I were the only two paddling in the boat – two of the others, Deepak and his friend would sit at the helm chatting while our guide was shouting for us to paddle…it got to the point where the chubbier guy was relieved of his paddling duties and instead asked to splay himself across the front of the boat to act as a weight…that was pretty funny because he must have swallowed bucket-loads of the Ganges as we were going through the rapids!

An added bonus for us is that now, in addition to knowing how to say “please dance” in Hindi, we can say “dude, paddle harder!”  I’m not sure how much I will need to use this phrase ever again, but nevertheless, it is now in my repertoire.

This was my first rafting trip and while my arm muscles were REALLY sore that evening, it is totally something I would love to do again.  There is definitely an adrenaline high that you get with adventure sports like rafting, climbing, and even diving.  And while I have never considered myself an adrenaline junky in the past, rafting was really a lot of fun!

Beyond the rafting and yoga, Rishikesh is a spiritual center where  come for weeks and months to live at the ashrams and practice mediation and yoga – that is a bit less of our scene so we enjoyed the town and went for walks along the shore.  I spotted this black cow here and Helen and I decided to do a mini photo-shoot of the cow on the beach…unfortunately one of the nearby cows was less impressed by our presence and intentions to turn this into an episode of America’s Next Top Cow and while I was consumed with the task of framing the perfect picture Helen snapped a very brief video of our scramble to avoid the charge of the lighter colored and oddly huge cow – there is a bit of awesomeness in the fact that neither of us realized the cow was aiming for us until he was quite close!

It’s as if India was trying to put it’s best foot forward our last days in the country because we also   happened upon a snake charmer on the side of the path – how cliché right?  But cool nonetheless :)  Oh, and I was completely in love with this fruit salad and curd – this is how we started nearly every day in India and Rishikesh had the best one of the whole trip!

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Reading: The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga.  I really enjoyed this book and am finishing it up – the narrator’s voice is very bizarre but the story was compeling and it’s giving me a lot of insight into the Indian culture without reading like a history book.

Music: Look Away by Chicago.  This has been stuck in my head for about 35 hours now.

Where am I really?: Tuscany – Florence to be specific!