Weekend on the Ganga
On Thursday night, sudden plans were made to travel to Rishikesh for the weekend to visit some family living there. Rishikesh is a town on the Ganga river a few hours north/northeast of Delhi, in the recently carved out state of Uttaranchal in the Himalayan foothills. Along with the more bustling and crowded Haridwar a few kilometres downstream, it is a holy site for river dips and such like for Hindus, and the first site where the Ganga stops gurgling and skipping down the hills and starts showing signs of the expansive, sedate body it goes on to become further south and east. It is the gateway for the "char-dham" (Four Holy Sites?) pilgrimage in the Himalayas, but in recent decades, especially the last one, has also become what a cousin who lives there described to me as "the yoga capital of India" or some such, and it has also been a popular destination for white-water rafters. I last went to Rishikesh with my parents over a decade ago in January, and I remember a quiet morning visit to a temple on the river, a quick dip in the water and a good alu-paratha breakfast later on at a small roadside joint. The memory of the foothills had also lulled me into the idea that this was going to be a cool hill-town, as suggested by this picture.
I was wrong. It was HOT! Very hot, way more than any place with a Himalayan foothill in view ought to be. It was also severely overrun by tourists and large Volvo buses jostling and honking for space in the small lanes - those from all over India rushing off to the Char Dham, as well as Delhi-walas in their cars looking for a ‘retreat’ from the plains. ‘Getaway’ tourism, resorts/spas and yoga-themed retreats are apparently in high fashion in Rishikesh, with a construction boom and, naturally, a land mafia making the most of it. Many restaurants advertising different cuisines (Italian and Israeli were most common, in addition to the by-now regulation north Indian, south Indian, Chinese and Continental). A restaurant offering only one cuisine, you say? Ptchah, couldn’t possibly be any good, when there are so many that offer a variety. Some of my foodie friends shudder at the thought of pasta on the same plate as a pulao (many of these places are buffets), but those with large families say it prevents bickering about where to eat, since the menu has everything anyway. ‘Multi-cuisine’, therefore, is a tourist buzzword alongside ‘getaway’ these days.
We went to one such getaway place for lunch, which I was persuaded into going to after hearing about its fabulous mangrove and leechee trees right on the Ganga upstream from Rishikesh. I had an overpriced ordinary meal, but the river view and the garden, practically overflowing with fruit and an amazing variety of Himalayan birds, totally made up for it. I walked down to the river bank and watched some intrepid rafters go by in the 40 C plus heat. A few degrees cooler, later in the evening, a gin-and-tonic, maybe some raw mango slices rubbed with salt and chilli powder, and this position would have been bliss:
Later in the day, we visited Rajaji National Park nearby, which is a large forest, home to several species of mammals and birds. We took a short elephant safari through the forest on the graceful Arundhati, a 70 year old female elephant with a mildly disobedient manner (she kept going off the track to snack on some branches).
Our guide, Mohammed Shafi, had a very keen eye, and helped us spot not only lots of different birds (am still trying to identify them) and sambar and chital deer, but also the rare and beautiful striped hyena. I had my heart set on seeing a leopard, which along with wild elephant and boar, is quite a common sight in this forest, but was disappointed. It was a lovely ride, though, and the forest is beautiful.
What about the knitting, you ask? Firstly, the heat that I was dreading is here (115 degrees high all week this week) and so it’s on hold. Secondly, a very friendly and nosy dog decided he wasn’t having any of my knitting attempts when it was so hot, and you can see him registering his protest against the Cascade Fixation skein:
It was quite an effort to get it out of his mouth. So I put the needles away, before he chewed them up.