Mā India

Shit! You really need to keep your wits about you in these parts. I’ve almost come a dangerous cropper a few times already, and I just got here.

Namaste my friend.

Welcome to India.

This ain’t a place for the fainthearted, nor the supersensistive.

Into The Quagmire

I landed at India Gandhi Airport in Delhi late at night, and was through passport control and customs, with my backpack, in about 15 minutes flat. What a shock!

And then India started.

It took forever for my new SIM card to activate, and I needed to wait at the mobile phone counter until it did. Just in case. They couldn’t tell me how long it would take.

But it finally happened. I was happy.

Then I couldn’t board the metro because I’m carrying a knife, and was determined not to give it up. So I had to get a local bus, which was a serious mission to find. There’s little signage, and no one to ask. The bus departure point is completely random, but after about half and hour I did eventually find it, and also found a guy at a little bus information counter to ask.

Me: Excuse me, when does the bus leave for Kashmiri Gate?

Bus guy: Yes

Me: Dhanyavaad (thank you), but when does the bus leave for Kashmiri Gate? (pointing to my imaginary watch)

Bus guy: Sometime (Indian head wiggle).

And there you have it.

Public information is a very rare commodity in this country.

After waiting at least an hour, and after being shuffled on and then off another bus, I finally got on one that took me to within walking distance of Paharganj, a district close to New Delhi Railway Station, where there’s cheap hotels and guesthouses.

As soon as the plane landed and started taxi-ing, everyone got up and opened the overhead luggage compartments and fiddled around with their bags up there. Despite the flight supervisor’s constant announcements for people to sit down, everyone totally ignored her, even when flight attendants came around and physically asked them to sit down.

On the old rattler to town

Delhi had a multimillion rupee facelift earlier this year, as it was hosting the G20 political and economic summit, and the Prime Minister wanted to impress foreign leaders and their media. The poor were bussed away for the event, and unsightly messes temporarily cleaned up.

Due to the big annoying macaque monkey problem in the city, they installed large cutout pictures of langurs (another monkey which is the natural enemy of the macaque), and hired people to make langur sounds to scare the macaques away.

It’s true.

You’d never know there was a cleanup now though, looking around. It’s a bloody mess.

The railway station did get some coloured lights though, and they’re still working (for the time being).

After midnight. People and rubbish on Main Bazaar, aptly named, as the main drag through Paharganj.

The mazey laneway to my guesthouse.

And a super late dinner.

Awww, a smiley face soap holder in my bathroom. So sweet. I searched around the bathroom for a seriously frowning one as well, so I could do the cleanliness rating, but I couldn’t find one.

But the room was ok, and I slept like a mid afternoon tuk tuk driver.

Flying The Rapids

A few hours later and I was in amongst it.

Walking the streets of Delhi is the furthest you could get from a stroll in the park.

Rather, it’s more like diving into a river with rapids, with sharp twists and turns, and with rocks and deadly branches flying at you from all directions, all ready to hit and upend you completely without warning.

You have to be super vigilant and keep looking around.

It’s quite a steep learning curve if you’re not used to it.

I’ve been here before, but still my brain needed to make some quick adjustments.

Eventually, once you know what’s out there, you just naturally stay watchful.

Rickshaws and motorbikes zipping very close are just one of the obstacles

Brekky spot

I found a guy to repair my Thai sandals, which I’ve worn every single day for the past 7 months. They’ve still got a few thousand clicks in them I reckon.

Gridlock. Crossing roads can be a mission here. Sometimes you actually need to climb over parts of cars or rickshaws to get through, as they are literally touching each other, and there’s no other way through.

Statue maker. Don't you love the sunnies?

Big load

It’s still a bit of a way

The bitumen has been dug up, but not replaced

Traffic chaos

This poor girl didn’t look too happy on there

Paharganj icon

Beefing up the laneway

In the wholesale grain district. So many varieties and strains of rice.

Auspicious stares

Sometimes you see the most amazing things. This girl was earning a living by doing tricks on a slack line - well, a slack rope. She set up on the side of a busy road, so close to the buildings that she had to tilt her bamboo pole sometimes to avoid hitting the live electrical cables attached to the side of the building.

So first she wandered up and down the rope, and then began swinging wildly from side to side. Later she put a tall metal pot on her head, and walked across the rope a few times without dropping it. It was unbelievable.

Trucks and buses passed her, almost touching her pole, people and animals were walking past right next to her, and one guy tripped up on one of the bamboo tripods holding up her rope.

So unnervingly trippy, to watch this accident-waiting-to-happen.

Taking the metro

Isn’t one gun enough?

The sparkle of Paharganj at night

Paan wallah. Paan is a really popular snack, which consists of dried betel leaf, chopped betel nut, slaked lime, and assorted other ingredients. It’s rolled into a triangle and then chewed, then spat out or swallowed. It can be addictive, as it’s quite the stimulant. It’s also super bad for your teeth and gums. I was happy to spit mine out, I don’t particularly like it.

Btw wallah is the Hindi word for seller, or vendor.

Fontificating in my guest house

Each of those slivers of pineapple have been meticulously sliced by this guy, to remove the hard bits in the skin. Every rupee counts.

When else would you use your dipper?

To Rishikesh

I didn’t really hang in Delhi too long, as interesting as it is, because I wanted to get into the mountains before it gets even more freezing than it already is, and I also have a date somewhere else at the end of this month that I don’t wanna miss.

So I rickshawed it to one of the many Delhi bus stations early, and got on a pretty comfy bus. Not Thai or Vietnamese comfy by a long shot, but comfy enough. Although I wish I had shorter legs.

I bought a snack at the bus station. The wallah said he had no change. A likely story. So he gave me a pack of peanuts instead. It was basically empty.

It took us 2 hours just to get out of the city. In true Indian style, we departed with the bus almost empty, then drove around the city picking people up. We even returned pretty close to where we’d first departed from, at least an hour later, before we finally headed north.

The endless outer burbs of Delhi, home to 33 million people, which is considerably more than the whole of Australia.

Delhi is the second most polluted city in the world, in terms of air quality. The numero uno worst is Kashgar in China, but that’s small in comparison to Delhi, as it has less than a million people.

Seven of the ten most polluted cities in the world are in India, and 2 others are also on the subcontinent (Lahore in Pakistan and Birganj in Nepal).

The air quality league table places Australian bigger cities (Sydney and Melbourne) normally around the middle, in the 50s or 60s. Except during bushfire smoke haze days of course, when they’re up there with the toxic best of them.

Funky apartment buildings, Indian style. One of them wouldn’t stop looking at me.

It may be hard to see from this pic, but this overpass had just recently been paved with bitumen, obviously with big machines and rollers etc. The thing is, they decided to leave the tree there on the side, and put bitumen all around it, right up to its trunk, to allow the workers to have shade right through to the very end of construction.

Only in India.

It's sorta smart.

Yeah, there’s cows on the highways, and everywhere else

To Hindus, cows are sacred, and 20 out of the 28 Indian states have legislation banning cow slaughter. The fines range from a minimum of one year’s imprisonment (and a big fine), right up to life. It’s true.

In Gujarat, the home state of the conservative Hindu Prime Minister Narendra Modi (and where he was previously Chief Minister), the laws are completely over-the-top. In 2020 a truck driver there was sentenced to life imprisonment simply for transporting cows to another state for slaughter.

This, my friends, is a mountain of rubbish. Every day, the people of Delhi generate 11,300 tonnes of it. And they’ve gotta put it somewhere don’t they? This is only one of the places that’ve been majorly trashed in the city. There’s two other big tips in Delhi, with all three combined covering an area of over 200 acres, roughly the same as 150 AFL football fields.

Accident ahead. Unbelievably, I saw three accidents on the short 6 hour journey from Delhi to Rishikesh. Three! The first was this one, where a couple of cars had collided. And the second two were big trucks lying sideways across the highway, I don’t know what happened. So dodgy.

Every year 150,000 people die on the roads in India, 422 every single day, in a daily accident total of 1130. This is incredibly high, considering the low percentage of vehicle ownership in the country (around 8%, compared to Australia’s nearly 100%).

I met a beautiful man, Harrison, at our bus lunch break. He was once a personal trainer, then became a yoga teacher, and is now practicing and teaching mindfulness, and basically trying to help people to love themselves and each other. An intention close to my heart. He’s got a podcast, and has even written a published book about the subject, Your Cosmic Love Antenna.

Yeah, what a title.

My cute newly repainted little guest house in Rishikesh

The old school hot water heater inside. It sorta worked. The water was almost hot.

Some murals outside

Scammed

As Harrison and I headed out for food we ran into Anne. She was with a bunch of other people, and asked us if we knew where her guest house was (we didn’t) and Harrison noticed that she seemed to be having a really hard time.

She couldn’t find her guest house because she didn’t have an Indian SIM card yet, so she couldn’t use any map apps or call her guest house to sort it out. But most importantly, she’d just arrived in India that morning, for the first time in her life, and had already been scammed out of $600! She was super upset, poor thing, and almost burst into tears when she told us.

We helped her find her guest house, and we all went out and had food.

She told us in detail what had happened that morning.

Anne arrived into Delhi on an overnight flight from Istanbul around 2am, after not sleeping at all on the flight because she was lucky enough to have a screaming baby in the seat behind her. Her connecting flight to Hardwar (the closest airport to Rishikesh), wasn’t leaving till later in the morning.

She went to the information counter at the airport to find out how to get to the other terminal, where her connecting flight departed from, so she could just chill out there for a few hours till her flight boarded, and maybe even get some sleep.

There were people serving at the information counter, and a couple of guys outside the counter, who appeared to be connected to the information desk (maybe their clothes were the same or something, I don’t know). Anyway they asked Anne what she needed, and she asked them how to get to the other terminal.

The guys asked her when her flight was, and when she told them it wasn’t until late morning they told her that the terminal was closed for the night, and she couldn’t go there until early morning.

However, they said there was an airport hotel, if she wanted to get some sleep, and they could organise a taxi for her if she wanted. She was a bit puzzled, but thought it wasn’t a bad idea, and completely trusted them because they seemed to be airport officials.

They weren't.

Anyway, long story short, they took her to a hotel, swiped her credit card for the hotel and taxi, but then told her the receipt machine wasn’t working. Then she started to get suspicious, and asked to be connected to wifi (to check the transactions online). They said the wifi was down. So she asked one of them, who had been using the internet on his own phone, if she could hotspot him, but he said his hotspot didn’t work.

Then the rupee dropped. She started to feel really freaked out. She was in a hotel somewhere with guys she didn’t know, she didn't know exactly where she was, she had no internet or way of contacting anyone, and her credit card had just been swiped for an unknown amount, by these obviously dodgy characters.

She started to feel really scared, and thoughts that maybe something worse that just a financial scam might happen started to enter her head. Traumatic. So bravely she just demanded that they immediately take her back to the airport, which they did. She didn’t allow them to swipe her card again for the second taxi ride.

The thing is, Anne’s a seasoned traveller. She’s just spent the past few months travelling in the Baltic states and Turkey. She said it’s the first time ever she’s handed over her card without checking the machine for the amount, and she still can’t understand why she did it.

Man, I feel for her. It was a really traumatic experience. It’s quite easy to be conned like that in certain situations, and, I must say, the very first couple of days in a new country are generally the most anxious, because you really don’t know how things work, what people are like, how much you can trust them, etc etc.

When she was finally able to go online, she realised the guys had swiped 600 smackeroos from her bank account. She’s gonna try and recover the money.

So what was there to do to help, but to walk down to the magnificent Ganga, and sit on the ghat, and allow the beautiful power of that place to start doing its healing thing.

Harrison, Anne and I have a beautiful easy connection, and it’s developed really quickly. I just love how that happens when you’re travelling sometimes.

Sacred Site

Rishikesh is a very important and holy place in India. Situated on the banks of the sacred Ganga, the Ganges River, the whole place is full of temples, ashrams and meditation centres. Indian pilgrims come here to bathe in the Ganga, do pujas in the temples, and receive blessings and teachings from the many famous gurus and holy people that live here.

Rishi became famous in the West because the Beatles came here in 1968, to study trancendental meditation at the ashram of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who was George Harrison’s meditation teacher at the time. The band was accompanied by a whole posse of family and friends, including other A-listers like the musician Donovan and the actress Mia Farrow.

The Beatles interest in the Maharishi had already made him famous in the West, and many celebrities came to regard him as their teacher, with his philosophies providing a way out from some of the pressures and materialism of the West.

It was a productive time at the ashram. Not only did all the Beatles meditate (at least some of the time), but they also wrote loads of great songs. Most of the Beatles’ White Album was written there. George was the one who was the most dedicated to the meditation practice, and John to a lesser extent, but some others in their retinue, particularly Prudence Farrow (Mia’s sister) became totally involved in the practice, spending days in her bungalow in deep meditation.

The Maharishi asked John and Paul to keep checking in on her, eventually leading to John writing the song “Dear Prudence,” trying to coax her out of her meditation obsession, so she’d go outside and enjoy nature, and hang out with them a bit more instead.

After a couple of months in the ashram, Mia Farrow told everyone that the Maharishi had made a pass at her, suddenly putting his arms around her while she was sitting with him, and she immediately left the ashram. This led to a complete falling out between the band and the Maharishi, and everyone left before the course was complete. The song “Sexy Sadie,” by Paul and John, about a girl who was the “greatest of them all” and who “made a fool of everyone,” was actually originally titled Maharishi, who was the protagonist in the original lyrics.

Despite all this, the Beatle’s interest in Eastern spiritual practices led to a boom in yoga and meditation in the West, and huge publicity for the town of Rishikesh, which is now regarded as pretty much the yoga capital of the world. There’s yoga courses, ashrams, meditation centres, music schools, retreats and courses all over the place. Tens of thousands of Westerners come here every year to find themselves. They also find each other, eat delicious food, go on great nature walks and swims in rivers and waterfalls, hang out at the puja ceremonies, and get involved in a beautiful spiritual scene. And all at a bargain price.

The town is based right at the foothills of the Himalaya, and is a jumping off point to visit the Chota Char Dham, the four small holy places, which devout Hindus try to visit at least once in their lifetime, because if they do it’ll help them achieve moksha (Nirvana, salvation, heaven, whatever you want to call it). The four Chota Dhams are Gangotri, Yamunotri, Kedarnath and Badrinath.

Just to confuse matters, there’s also the Char Dham pilgrimage sites in India, the four holy places, stretched right out across the country. These are Badrinath (near Rishikesh), Dwarka (in Gujarat), Puri (south of Calcutta), and Rameswaram, way down south in Tamil Nadu.

This guy ran straight into a post. I saw it happen. when he reversed, the side of the panel hooked onto the post and ripped right off. Surprisingly, he didn't seem to mind too much.

There are 2 pedestrian bridges across the Ganga a little bit away from the town of Rishikesh, Ram Jhula and Laxman Jhula, and most of the ashram and teaching and pilgrimage action happens over on the eastern bank of the river, or in Tapovan, up the hill on the western bank.

One morning Harrison and I (not George, he’s dead) went for a long adventure, exploring this beautiful place. We strolled towards Laxman Jhula, but the bridge is being rebuilt, so we just moseyed on over to the next one, Ram Jhula, crossed the river, and Harrison found a great spot for a dip in the holy Ganga.

Harrison doing his thing

I also dipped, but the pic is only in my memory

We went into a few temples and ashrams, there’s loads of them around, given the auspiciousness of the place.

Hari Son, my nickname for Harrison, and I being India brothers

Some sadhus live in this makeshift dwelling on the banks of the Ganga. A sadhu is basically a religious ascetic, who has renounced worldly life and all possessions, and is on a life quest to realise moksha. They’re easily recognisable in India, as they wear orange robes and often have great beards and hairstyles. They survive by receiving donations from people, often for their teachings.

A grey langur, the same animal the Indian government used photos of and voice imitators to scare off the macaques in Delhi.

Later I took a vikram, a shared autorickshaw, to the bus station to get a ticket.

One of many many

Love Buckets

Later that eve Anne and I went and had a meal, and ended up chatting for hours. She’s an amazingly warm and super interesting woman, and has an infectious zest for life that I absolutely love. She was also incredibly open and honest right off the bat. My kinda person.

Both of us ended up really opening up about ourselves, which in a way is not really a surprise, because we just knew we could. You know what I mean. Sometimes you meet people and you know right away they’ve got depth and they’re prepared to go there. And you can connect in a really deep way super quickly.

What a great thing travelling is. It opens so many doors.

Originally from Melbourne, Anne’s been working as a trail guide for the Larapinta Trail, that amazing 250km walking trail through Tjoritja (the Western MacDonnell Ranges) in Central Australia that Miranda, Iain, Michael and I walked last year.

She’s actually in the process of starting her own business taking people out there herself, and is just waiting for approval from the relevant local indigenous communities before she gets going. Informing the people she guides about the indigenous stories and amazingly rich culture of that land is a central part of her guiding practice, as well as creating a space for the deep personal growth that can happen when you leave your old world behind and spend time in a place that’s so incredibly pristine, vast and beautiful.

Anyway we went out after dinner and found some great local music. Hari joined us for awhile. The people at this bar were so friendly, the music and the food was good, and the alcohol was under the counter. Alcohol’s illegal in Rishikesh, as it’s a very holy place. And so is non-vegetarian food, for that matter.

Anne and I even squeezed in a bit of dancing at the end. I gotta say, a good long dance is something I’m really missing.

To The Glorious Himalaya

I’m so excited.

Tomorrow I’m gonna take a 12 hour rattlebus, and head way up into the Himalaya.

I'm off to Gangotri, one of the four holy pilgrimage sites here in Uttarakhand, and the source of the sacred Ganga river. I’m gonna go hiking up there too.

It’ll be so good to be in those mountains again.

The beauty’s so overwhelming, but so is the cold at this time of year.

I’ll need to wear every warm thing I own❤️