Leaving Dharamsala, Rishikesh Round 2, and My First Ashram Experience

Hello, friends! So yes, it has clearly been a long time since my last blog entry and for that I apologize. Much has happened since I have left India, and now that all the dust has (long since) settled from my travels, I am finally ready to write the final installations of my India blog. So since we last spoke, I had been in Dharahmsala dancing with Ms. Tibet and marveling at the natural beauty of the Himilayas. I had previously written about going back to Rishikesh and spending time at the ashram, but I never did talk about getting back there, so here goes: Our bus ride back to Rishikesh was quite an adventure. We took a night bus to save money and just figured we’d sleep on the bus. Our past experience getting to Dharamsala should’ve reminded us that any kind of rest or relaxation on a bus in India was somewhat of an impossibility, since the roads are either dirt or in disrepair, the turns are sharp, fast, and reckless, and the horns are insanely loud, even with earplugs. We left Dharamsala once I was able to find a functioning ATM to be able to buy my ticket. This in itself took almost half the day since there were 3 ATMs in the town and on that day, all 3 weren’t working. There was a fourth, actually, but you had to be a member of that particular bank to withdraw money and in order to be a member you had to be a citizen of India. So, my only option was to wait around until one of the ATMs got fixed. We began our 475 kilometer journey in the evening and from the very beginning it was a nail-biter. We had to descend the mountain on which Dharamsala was located and the path was narrow and full of turns. You literally couldn’t relax because if you did, the force from the turns would send you flying from your seat, so you had to hang on to whatever you could at all times. A positive note from this hellish descent was that during this time, the sun was setting over the mountains and the view was absolutely stunning. In between bumps and turns, I was able to admire the tranquil view and appreciate the amazing natural beauty that was so abundant in India. Then a hairpin turn would send me flying into the aisle. We did stop a few times on the way to refuel, stretch, and eat. During our first stop I exited the bus and noticed a nice, big, fan-like pattern of orange vomit on the side of the bus: A testament to the gut-wrenching experience an Indian bus ride can be. I was just glad it wasn’t me. Throughout my time in India I would find myself in certain places or situations and would pause and think to myself, “Wow, it would REALLY suck to get sick right now” and I concluded that a 9-hour bus ride would be one of the worst. I was almost a month into my journey and still no “Delhi belly” so I was feeling most fortunate. Anyway, we were given about 45 minutes to eat dinner at the gas station/restaurant where we had stopped. After making a pit stop at a bathroom that would make your average porta-potty seem luxurious, I went into the restaurant to get my grub on. While in line, I befriended an Indian guy around my age and he invited me to eat with him. He even insisted on paying for my dinner. At first I refused, because I still had my Indian salesman repellent mindset and was convinced that if he bought me dinner, I would have to buy something from him. But, since he was not a salesman and seemed very nice, I accepted. I even let him choose my food. We sat down and I proceeded to have the best meal of Indian food I had ever had. I kept asking my new friend what it was so I could remember for later…but seven months later, I forgot. I was very hungry and the food was so amazing that I ate it all very quickly and even asked if there was time for seconds. During our dinner, my friend (whose name I sadly cannot recall) asked me all about my perceptions of India and then told me that while all my destinations were interesting and significant in their own ways, the only way to see the “real” India was to go to the villages and see how life happens there. He was a very smart and ambitious young man, but told me of the difficulties of succeeding in India due to overwhelming poverty of the villages and overabundance of smart, driven, talented people. I remember thinking to myself: Man, if India ever gets rich, we are screwed. By that I mean that a large percentage of the people I met in India was very intelligent, motivated, and driven to succeed. However, due to overpopulation and crushing poverty, opportunities are few and far between. In the U.S. it seems to be quite the opposite. My dinner buddy told me that intelligence is one of the most important things one can possess. During our conversation, I told him I was from Israel and his eyes lit up and he told me that the man he respects most in the world is Jewish, and then proceeded to make me guess who it was. After a long string of “uuuuum”s I finally landed on the correct answer: Albert Einstein. After the best Indian meal of my life, we got back on the vomit-decorated bus and continued our nocturnal journey through the mountains of northern India. I was listening to my iPod for about half an hour and then it happened: a small but steadily growing discomfort in my stomach. This is it, I thought. After a month of being here and now in the worst possible spot, I’m going to puke my guts out and/or have diarrhea and there’s absolutely nowhere to go. I’m trapped. Shit. My inadvertent negative mental cheerleading of the situation wasn’t helping in any way. I was hot, sweaty, and uncomfortable as all hell, and now part of my brain is telling me that the next six hours are quite possibly going to be the worst of my life. The other part of my brain was fighting a losing battle with its evil half, trying to convince me that it’s all going to be ok, it’s probably just a little indigestion, or at worst you may just puke out the window once and that’ll be it. All I could do is breathe slowly and try to think happy thoughts…quite the challenge at the time. We kept on rolling through the darkness and while the stomach pains got worse and worse, there was no “moment of release” one way or the other, so all I could do was deal with the pain. We finally stopped at a bus stop in the middle of nowhere and I bought myself a Coke in the hopes of slowly sipping it and calming down the brawl in my stomach. Once when I was eleven years old I ate some Michael Jordan fruit snacks really fast and then vomited, no lie, seventeen times. Afterwards though, I slowly sipped on some Pepsi and felt much better, so I was hoping this Coke would have the same effects, sans vomit. And you know what? It DID! Hooray!!! I had dodged the Indian food bullet once again and after sipping the Coke, the pain slowly subsided. I concluded that it was in fact indigestion and next time don’t eat your Indian food so fast, you little piggy. Seriously though, I can still clearly recall how amazing that food was. Oh man, I want some right now. We arrived at the bus station at about 4 in the morning, so it was still dark outside. We had arrived in the city of Haridwar, which is near Rishikesh, so now we had to get to Rishikesh, but the first bus going there wouldn’t leave until 6. At first I was insistent on waiting because I didn’t want to pay for a rickshaw, but after sitting on the ground waiting at the bus station for about ten minutes I said ok, let’s take a rickshaw. The rickshaw ride we took was something I’ll forever remember. The ride was about an hour long and it was at dawn, so the beautiful morning light was steadily increasing, and the whole way to Rishikesh, the driver was blasting Shakira from his rickshaw’s speakers. It was beautiful. We even stopped a few times along the way to take pictures of the sunrise over the mountains. I was still bathing in the gigantic wave of relief that had washed over me from avoiding being sick on an Indian bus, so anything and everything during that morning seemed beautiful to me, including Shakira blasting in my ear at 5AM. We got to Rishikesh and headed to our ashram, but our room wouldn’t be ready until the next day, so we would have to spend one night in a hotel. Ok, no problem. We’ll just go back to the same hotel we stayed at previously. We did so, but they were sold out! Ok, no problem, we’ll just go to another one. Sold out! We went through a few more like this, but finally found one. At this point we were both exhausted and just wanted to get some rest. After settling in, Juliana went to the internet café and I decided to get some reading done. I lay on my bed, sweating as usual, and started reading a most entertaining book about a British youngster traveling in India. I was pretty engrossed in the book so I didn’t notice at first, but after a while I saw a few tiny green insects crawling on me. I put my book aside to brush them off, but then I noticed that they were ALL OVER my body and my sheets, so I got up and brushed them off and shook out my bedsheet and then realized that they were probably coming in through the cracks in the window and door frames. Duct tape to the rescue again! I sealed off the room, but only after I liberally sprayed myself and the door and window cracks with my bug spray. Not a good decision. After lying back down on my bed, the air thick with the aroma of bug spray, I tried to read, but very soon I started having difficulty breathing. I had never had asthma or anything like that, so I had to really restrain myself from freaking out. I concluded that it was the bug spray combined with the lack of ventilation that was causing my breathing difficulties, so I just went outside and after a few moments of breathing in the “fresh” Indian air, my breathing went back to normal. So now our dilemma is that if we keep the door closed, I’ll asphyxiate thanks to the bug spray, and if we keep the door open, the little green bugs will take over. We decided to leave. We payed the hotel lady half of our bill (which was not even two dollars) and thankfully found a decent room nearby that even had a swamp cooler. This device used water to cool the room, but it made everything extremely humid, so you had to choose: cool and wet, or hot and dry. We finally went with hot and dry. We were wet enough with our own sweat, we didn’t need a swamp cooler making us wetter. The next day we checked into our ashram and settled in. I honestly had no idea what to expect from this experience. I envisioned lots of yoga, meditation, chanting, and mind-expansion, and that seemed cool to me. What the ashram experience ended up being was somewhat similar to my guesses, just with lots and lots of free time thrown in the mix. We stayed in a dormitory style room at the ashram and had breakfast, lunch, and dinner there at the same times every day, but aside from that, there were no real obligations we had to meet. We were free to do whatever we wanted. For the first few days I attended several of their yoga classes and really enjoyed them, but then the yoga classes were interrupted by a group of folks who came to the ashram specifically for a 10-day yoga course, so no more free yoga classes. So now I really had a lot of free time, which I mostly spent by reading and wandering through Rishikesh and its surrounding areas. I also spent a lot of time sketching the various Hindu deities that appeared in statue form around the ashram. One of my favorite parts of the ashram was the people I met when I was there. People of all ages and backgrounds were there, and for all varieties of reasons, as well. I met a Canadian couple who told me amazing stories of deflecting baboon attacks during their travels in Africa. I met a Brazilian man who lives in Canada who quit his job as a scientist to come here and study to become an Ayurvedic doctor. I’m convinced that this man was one of the smartest people I had ever met. Every conversation we had I came away with incredible amounts of knowledge that he passed along with great enthusiasm. Through the conversations I had with the people I met, I was exposed to so much knowledge and ways of thinking that simply don’t exist in the western hemisphere (or at least that I hadn’t been exposed to). I met a couple of Hare Krishna followers there who had actually opened a temple in San Diego back in the 1970s. The conversations I had with them got really philosophical and abstract almost to the point where I wanted to cut them off and say: Ok, you realize that everything you’re saying is total bullshit, right? But they were so enthusiastic and friendly that I would just listen and in the brief moments they would give me to answer, I would reply with my own succinct opinions, which were usually contrary to theirs. It was all very interesting though, because it made me aware of how much more knowledge and religious scripture was out there that I had no idea existed. Towards the end of the stay, I wandered out one evening and sat on the banks of the Ganges and reflected upon my time in India. Although I had Polish death metal playing through my iPod headphones, I was calm, reflective, and a little bit sad to be leaving the place I had called home for the last six weeks. But, I was also excited to be going to a completely different environment. After a while, the crowds, pollution, heat, and overall filthiness of India can wear on you. I was on my way to Cuneo, Italy to see my good friend Tyler get married and I could almost taste the gelato. Speaking of ice cream and filth, after my reflection on the Ganges, I went to a local shop to get a mango popsicle for dessert. I had finished the delicious treat before I got back to the ashram, but I still had the popsicle stick and the wrapper in my hand and no trash can in sight. Walking through the crowded filthy street, I spent at least ten minutes trying to find a place to dispose of my litter, while the entire time it was dripping sticky, sugary mango juice onto my hand. As I was searching, I thought to myself ”just drop it on the street, there’s a million other pieces of litter, your little stick and wrapper won’t make a bit of difference.” But I told myself no, I was not going to perpetuate the problem of garbage everywhere. I was going to keep looking for a proper means of disposal. Eventually, I found a small yellow trash can outside of a gem shop on the main street of Rishikesh. I disposed of my trash with a clear conscious and a sticky hand. Mission accomplished. Beside the gem shop with the yellow trash can, there was a book store that I decided to check out. I had started leafing through a book that suggested Jesus had traveled to India in his youth when I noticed the owner of the gem shop exit the shop and pick up the little yellow trash can. Hmmm, I thought to myself, I wonder where he’s taking that trash can? Just as I finished that thought, the owner inverted the trash can and dumped its contents, along with my mango popsicle stick and wrapper, on the street. Awesome. Well folks, thanks for reading! Coming up next, my final day in India and how I spent it. Hint: I wore a helmet. -Matan