7 August 2011
Today is our last day in Rishikesh. We’re leaving tonight for McLeod Ganj, location of the big Tibetan community. In Rishikesh we took yoga classes that were very good. There were some familiar poses but mostly unfamiliar ones and it combined a little cardiovascular exercise (something like jumping jacks) with things like sun salutation and then pretty intense abdominal workouts that were very pilates-like (boat pose). However, the best part of the class was definitely at the end when we practiced laughing yoga which we learned was good for the heart, diaphragm, and for rejuvenating the spirit and the body. Jordan and I both walked out feeling great.
Yesterday we made our way to Maharash (something something) Ashram, which is a huge complex that includes living places, praying places and even a post office! Although it is huge and has, in the past, held importance for Hindu monks and pilgrims who come to Rishikesh for its religious and spiritual draw, it is best known to us as the prior residence of the Beatles! Apparently they wrote the majority of the White Album here and it was fun to walk there and think “Oh boy! The Beatles once walked exactly where I’m walking right now!” For some reason, the place has been completely abandoned since then. The paths were so overgrown that sometimes they were hard to find. The little domed stone huts were covered in bright green moss and the bigger buildings are littered with broken glass, general rubble, and insect carcasses. It was interesting to wander around, and we were surprised to see that so few other tourists made their way over. It made us think how, even in a town that’s relatively very friendly and open to foreigners / tourists, even Rishikesh is not meeting its “tourist potential.”
(Here is a post we wrote a long time ago but didn't get a chance to put up on the internet until now)
26 July 2011
We’ve been going through increasingly small villages and towns and have experienced, more or less, an inverse relationship between the size of a place and how friendly it is to us. We’re writing this blog post from Orchha where sales people listen when you tell them you’re not interested and the auto-rickshaw we took actually gave us a fair price (and an interesting experience). It’s very quiet and green here right now. Orchha is kind of like an island because on all sides it is bordered by major rivers. We spoke with one of the shop owners who told us that it was good we were coming at the beginning of the monsoon season because in another month or so the major roads in and out of Orchha will be covered with water and impassible! We also learned that instead of having four seasons (summer, autumn, winter, spring), here there are three seasons that each last about 4 months: summer, monsoon, and winter.
We spent our morning in the Orchha nature preserve which was quite beautiful, very quiet. We were hoping to see peacocks but such was not our luck.
Orchha is famous for its palaces and temples. We wandered the palace grounds for a bit and, among other things, came across a family that was living inside one of the lesser visited buildings of the palace. I think it may have once been a temple. In general, Orchha is an important religious site for Hindus and there are certain things you notice as a result. We didn’t see one restaurant here serving meat and only some places serve eggs (the use of eggs is at the very least very well marked) or alcohol. Since coming to India we have learned that being vegetarian here can – but doesn’t necessarily – mean more than simply not eating meat. Vegetarian cooking and cuisine here often excludes eggs and alcohol but also garlic and onion. As I’ve mentioned before, it’s really nice to live and eat in a place where I can absolutely trust that I’m not eating meat -- although that’s where my trust in the food might stop.
Orchha, because it is such a great tourist hub advertises multi-national cuisines including continental, American, Mexican, Israeli, Italian, and, of course, Indian. We were looking forward to sampling Indianised nachos or Shakshuka but sadly, it is off season for the tourist industry and restaurants do not offer all that their menus indicate. Today I ordered a palaak parantha (bread stuffed with spinach) and the restaurant manager? waiter? said that he would check in the nearby market to see if there was any spinach to be had. (There wasn’t). Similarly, after dinner we ordered ras gulla (sweet balls of ?? soaked in a syrup) and our waiter got on his motorbike to drive to the nearby market and came back five minutes later with our dessert.
Also, here in Orchha as well as in Khajuraho (the last place we stayed) something very strange happens at sundown. We first noticed it at dinner in Khajuraho when a small beetle-like bug fell on our rooftop table. One bug quickly became many bugs and when we walked back to our hotel, we had to walk on a thin and crunchy carpet of bug! In this part of the country in this part of the year it literally rains bugs.
JORDAN: Bug raining is not as bad it sounds, because they’re basically like indigo blue ladybugs – very innocuous. Nevertheless, when you’re walking outside and they’re raining, some folks cover their mouths, and you’ll be picking them out of your hair and your clothes for a long while after you get indoors. They literally cover the ground so that you almost can’t see the pavement. They got in both hotel rooms we’ve been in when they hit – I think by getting under the door. But after we swept them off the bed and turned the light on in the bathroom to attract them, they didn’t bother us. And what’s truly incredible is that they were basically gone by morning. They’re migrating in the clouds and landing at night.
As we get into smaller villages, we get less English to work with, but folks get friendlier and friendlier. As mentioned, people share food with us on trains (one man on a crowded bus even cut up his coconut into tiny pieces and walked the aisles giving little bites of coconut to a bus full of strangers – that’s the kind of sharing culture we’re talking about), people stop us when they see us going the wrong way to a landmark, they say hello and ask us where we’re from so much that it’s actually burdensome. And then there’s the legions of people who stop and ask for pictures with us. I feel like I’m in a Donald Duck suit and would actually like for some of that to stop.
We met up with a studying astrologer in Orchha who is taking two weeks off from touring and studying with something like 50 gurus throughout the countryside, who explained that one of the reasons India is a more colorful place than America is because the plants in India create twice as many colors of natural dyes and such as do the plants in America. We met a guy on the train who explained that the poverty of India’s countryside is deceptive, because India has such a strong culture of savings that they don’t show their wealth in their standard of living; that many poor farmers you see sleeping with their whole family in a house made of sticks actually have permanent houses in the nearby villages that they stay in during winter; that England ruined India’s wealth when they left just before independence by looting the country of its gold (don’t know if this is true). We’ve experienced a very broad antipathy towards Pakistan, though Hindus always say they love their peaceful brother Muslims. We’ve exchanged e-mails with a few folks who always (extremely earnestly!) say they’re proud to have foreign friends. One guy invited us home to his village, but we didn’t have time.
Fun facts: Bright orange is the color men dye their greying hair. I want to say most of them.
Pink is the favorite color for houses.
During festivals (we hit Orchha during a minor one) folks sell all these brightly colored powders for smearing on just about anything (including the local monuments). Also, during these festivals, there have been loudspeakers throughout town where some man reads prayers ALL DAY, non-stop, so that you can hear it everywhere. This is especially amusing when his voice starts getting strained and he’s hacking phlegm and spitting it audibly by the microphone and 800,000 people are listening to it.
Everybody spits everywhere in this country. Many signs ask people not to spit near special things, because the presumption is they will if you don’t ask.
Getting in line for anything is an extremely aggressive experience. People push and cut and throw their money at the teller as you’re trying to conduct your transaction. I don’t think lines actually have meaning here, much like traffic rules. Getting on the bus was like an image of people getting onto lifeboats on the Titanic, complete with children screaming in fear.
Everything is amusingly misspelled in English. Everything.
Most of these small towns have garbage and sewage systems that are basically an open ditch dug along the road in front of all the houses. These are usually covered at least part of the length with concrete slabs. Over the open parts, people just walk out and dump garbage, or squat right in the road and do their business. There’s enough private parts I didn’t know I would see in the road to fill a documentary.
Yes, cows stop traffic regularly. Also, goats. Also, people driving on the wrong side of the road. We got beeped at today by a guy driving on the sidewalk, who demanded we move.
Children all talk to us and follow us places, like ducklings, even if they don’t know where we’re going or who we are.
Seeing monuments costs, literally, 25x as much for foreigners as for Indians.
People play music in public without headphones. On the bus. In the train. In restaurants.
People beep their horns whenever they’re within proximity of another car. Also, when they’re not in proximity of another car. We were walking along a peaceful road today, and I remarked that this could even be in America, until a motorcyclist came and went down the road with his horn blaring the entire way, and no other cars in sight. Then we knew we weren’t. Otherwise, major roads are so full of beeping that it ceases to have communicative value – the message has devolved strictly into “this is a road! There are cars!” 
Today we were able to volunteer by teaching English for a few hours. There were four students who showed up but no other volunteer teachers. One of my students was a Tibetan monk who only came to India three months ago and we had a very interesting conversation about what it was like to leave his home and his family.
We took a cooking class where we learned how to make three different Indian dishes (unfortunately not Tibetan) and bread! Here's Jordan looking very professional.
We took a cooking class where we learned how to make three different Indian dishes (unfortunately not Tibetan) and bread! Here's Jordan looking very professional.