This post will be kind of “loose,” written mostly stream of consciousness while I sat near the Ganges in Topovan.  I’m trying to break myself of the tendency to want to over-edit these posts.  This was the intent when I started SMLR last year, but I drifted from this intent, and after a while I found myself feeling like I had to write something refined and maybe profound every week….which I couldn’t do.  My bar slowly crept upwards until it became unsustainable, so I just stopped writing.  

There is a balance to be found here:  just organized enough to get my thoughts down in an somewhat intelligible fashion, but not so much that it takes the fun out of it.   For this one, I wrote most of it in Tapovan, then put a few extra comments in from Delhi the day after we returned.   

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This morning, 11 August, I am writing from Tapovan, a small town just north of Rishikesh at the southern edge of the Indian Himalaya range in Uttarakhand province.   Tapovan is where the Ganges river leaves the mountains and transitions too the wide plains of India.   As such, it is a popular spot for domestic and international tourists.  It is widely known for its many Ashrams and Yoga schools.

Topovan on Saturday morning

The Ganges is fast, high, and silty this weekend.  I don’t know how it usually is, but in most pictures I see it is calmer than it is now.  I suppose the heavy rains recently (monsoon season in the region) have swollen the river up.   The shoreline is still calm enough that bathers are getting in the river.  I got in myself about an hour ago.

My roommate Chris and I came up here Friday night after work, and head back to Delhi tonight (Sunday).   Chris set up all the logistics for the weekend, I said I was fine with whatever he decided to do.   He lined up the flights, the car ride, the hotel, and a few pre-planned excursions.   

Despite this, we’ve budgeted plenty of free time.  Yesterday I explored the town a bit on foot in the morning.  I wandered into a Hindu temple to look out onto the river, and got inadvertently pulled into a one-on-one Hindu ceremony.  Apparently I got blessed by the caretaker/priest, and I left there with orange paint on my forehead, Radraksh beads on my chest, and a few hundred less rupees in my pocket.   I like the beads though.    I went and found a quiet spot by the Ganges and meditated and wrote.

Later in the morning I linked up with Chris and we hopped in with a hotel driver and he took us to what had been described to me as the “Beatles Ashram.”  I didn’t know what to expect, and I had pretty low expectations – I expected a building with some yogis and lots of pictures of Lennon et al.   I was pleasantly surprise, it was nothing like this.

Read the Wikipedia article “Beatles Ashram” for the full description, but the cliff notes version

is as follows:  Maharishi Mahesh Yogi created this Ashram in the early 1960s, and it became famous when the Beatles and other celebrities attended for long retreats in the 60’s and 70’s.  It is reported that they wrote much of the White Album and Abbey Road while here.  It remained active until it was abandoned sometime in the 90s, after which point it was forgotten until it was revived by the Indian government in 2015 and integrated into a national park.  There were not many visitors there when we were there, on a Saturday afternoon.  The ashram is located in a very quiet jungle across the river from the main city of Rishikesh.  These are all interesting tidbits, but not nearly as interesting as the place itself.

The first thing you come to when you enter the ashram are clusters of round stone buildings in the woods, that have what look like stone beehives/igloos on top:

The meditation igloos

I’ll call them igloos.   There was no tour guide or amplifying info provided, but one can presume that these were used by individuals for extended solo meditation sessions.  They are two floors:  the first is just a toilet and an entranceway with stairs up up to the igloo, which is the entire second floor.  I crawled into one and tried to imagine

the experience of sitting there in isolation and silence for many hours or days.  There are 80-something of these caves scattered around the complex.   There are also many indoor meditation chambers in some of the structures, so I don’t think any of the residents likely had a hard time finding solitude during their stay.    On the roof of one of the larger residential buildings are a few very large igloos (aka: mega-igloos), of which the only entrance to the upper story is through a hole in the top that must be accessed by a rickety wire ladder.  I guess if you needed extra guarantee of no distractions, this was the spot.   I climbed up but not far enough to peek in before I turned around due to the height and wobbly ladder.

Also interesting here was the graffiti-like artwork all over the insides of these buildings.  Some of it was very professionally done, and much of it has to do with the Beatles.   But not all of  it, there was some very cool non-Beatles artwork on  the walls of the ruins.   Here are just a few:

One also notices that – although it has only been 20-something years since the ashram has been out of commission – everything is very overgrown, and you would think that it’s been much longer.  Amazing how fast nature can reclaim the works of human hands.

Some shots from  around the ashram

This visit had a surprising special interest for me, and I didn’t know it until I got there.  Maharishi Mahesh Yogi is one of the central figures and teachers of transcendental meditation (TM) , and is regarded as being the one who brought it to the attention of the west.  Allie and I attended a week of TM indoctrination and classes about four years ago.  It was my first exposure to any kind of structured meditation practice.   Since then my meditation practice has been sporadic at best, but since late May I have been rather consistent with getting in 20 minutes a day.  And I largely (although not exclusively) practice the TM method.

So… when I got to the ashram and found out that this was the home and teaching center of Maharishi, it struck a chord with me and brought me back to my initiatiation during the TM class.   TM is not highly ritualistic, but in the class we took four years ago there was a sense of reverence for Majarishi as its teacher and guru. So for me personally, this aspect of the place had more meaning and interest than the fact that the Beatles stayed here.  Sounds kinda cheesy, but it sorta reinvigorated my commitment to continue my practice regularly.   It was very cool to walk around what was once the center of the TM movement.

After lunch and returning to the hotel I decided to go back out and explore more on foot, this time heading uphill into the mountains.   As soon as I left the main drag in the uphill direction, the busyness of the tourist sector subsided and I found myself running through narrow streets in a quiet residential neighborhood, with a few ashrams here and there.  Further uphill and the buildings became intermittent and I was on a road winding uphill through the forested valley.   At the first opportunity, I turned off the paved road onto a dirt road that headed up one side of the valley.  This dirt road quickly contracted to single track and it climbed about 1000ft up to a wooded ridgeline.  I did a little lollipop loop up here as the sky darkened with rain clouds, then sat for a while in a clearing and enjoyed the silence.

A quick aside:  since arriving Delhi I have continued to run, 3-4 times a week and usually short jaunts: 3-5 miles.   However, in Delhi I do so with the uneasy recognition that I am cycling very bad air through my lungs.  I usually check the air quality report first and make sure it’s not code red, but even yellow or high-green by Delhi standards is still very bad anywhere else in the world.  You feel it in your eyes on a bad day.

So – my run yesterday felt amazing and refreshing for several reasons: 1) the air felt clean, 2) I was on a mountain trail, and 3) my hip and legs felt good.   I will likely go back up again today before we leave.

Last night we got a ride a few hours south to Hardawar to see and experience the Hindi pilgrimmage at the Ganges there.  Hardawar is one of the sacred sites in Hinduism for pilgrims to conduct their cleansing in and offerings to the river Ganges.   There were tens of thousands (if not hundreds of thousands…I’m not good with estimating these things) of people there, and the air was buzzing with energy and excitement.  I asked Chris if this went on every weekend…he told me that it happened every night, and that for many of the people bathing and making offerings to the river in front of us,  this night was the culmination of a once in a lifetime Hindu pilgrimmage to the Mother Ganga.   We stayed for about an hour and soaked it in, and I dipped my feet in the Ganges.  We were the only westerners we saw there that night.

We drove back to Tapovan after dark, during which we almost got into about 29 head-on collisions, but after a month in India these don’t bother me anymore.   It’s just part of being on the road here.

Now, the following morning, I find myself at a table at the Ganga Beach cafe, right alongside the E bank of the Ganges, looking downriver several hundred meters at a group of people and cows on the opposite river bank, and behind and above me is the Laxman Jhula footbridge.  The sun is out and it is warm.   I have a chai tea, a couple books, and nothing to do for about five hours.   Life is good.

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12 Aug addendum:

So after I wrote the above, I wandered into the small district on the east side of the river.   I had a purpose though: I made my way to a small music shop, where I had gone the previous day to tried out some harmoniums.  I had tried out some of the harmoniums….they were cool, but I decided to be patient shop around before buying.   However, while I was there the shopkeeper showed me another instrument called a Surti-box.  I was intrigued.  It is essentially a small bellows box and on one side there are holes that coincide with one octave on the piano.  The holes are covered by little lever things, that you can move aside to let air pass through.   Essentially – you pick your key and tones, and then begin pumping he bellows, and it lets out a constant drone.  Very cool sounding, and requires very little technical skill above feathering the bellows to avoid breaks in the droning.

So yesterday I went in an bought one.  I tried a few of them, and picked the one that I though sounded the best.    With a carry-bag it was ~3500 rupees…about 50 USD.   Well worth it.  I played it this morning, and need to tinker with it a little bit to make it more dynamic (I want to be able to change keys mid-drone….the levers are too tight right now to do that).   I think I’ll have a lot of fun and make cool sounds with the Surti-box.

A harmonium is still in the cards for sure.  I will poke around Delhi and see what shops here have.

After that I made my way back towards the hotel, stopped for a chai, and did a little spur-of-the-moment shopping along the way.   Got good things.  

Our ride back to the airport was at 330pm, and by now it was ~1pm, so I dropped my stuff of in the room and headed back out.  I really wanted to get back on the trails for a good run.  I headed towards the opposite side of the valley this time….down the hill through town, across the Laxman Jhula footbridge, up through the market on the far side, and across the road to the edge of the forest.   Right there, only 50 meters from where the town ended was a small foot trail heading up the valley.  Booyah!

I went up and up….it was steep and rocky so mostly hiking.  The midday heat was strong but felt good.   After a while the trail leveled out a bit and contoured north through the woods along the mountainside.  Then I started seeing clothes strung up on trees, and I popped into some sort of cultivation field.  Up ahead was a building, and I could see a lady out front washing clothes in a bucket.  I slowed to a walk and approached slowly so as not to startle her.   She saw me and I tried to ask if it was ok for me to cut through her yard to continue on the trail.   She spoke zero English, but I could tell she was wondering what my deal was.  I gave the international hand signal for running:  invert your pointy and middle fingers and move them back and forth like running legs.   She understood, and offered me water, by pointing at her laundry bucket.  Even though I assumed she didn’t literally mean the water that her dirty laundry was sitting in, I politely declined, and instead asked to cross her property to where the trail continued, which I did.   

This may seem like a overly-detailed account of a chance run-in, but what made it memorable to me was the remoteness and location of this household.  About 2 miles straight up the mountainside from town, in the middle of the jungle.  I saw no possible way to get there other than the foot trail I had just come up.   It was over 1000ft from the valley floor and the river Ganges below.    It looked like a comfortable cinderblock two story building, but I doubt they have electricity.  But they have a full view over the Ganges valley north of Topovan.  The cultivated area around the house consisted of banana trees, some bamboo, and some other stuff that I didn’t recognize.   I wonder if they take guests…would be a cool place to stay a night or two. 

I went a little further until the trail kinda closed in on me, and so I sat down and rested for a bit.  Then I headed back down the way I came, through the yard, and back down the mountain into town, and back to the hotel.  It was an awesome run.  I didn’t carry my phone or iPod, so I have exclusive rights to the images from this run, as they exist only in my head.   

I’m sure there are plenty more trails to explore in the area, although I couldn’t find a trail map (I asked a few places, no dice).  The only way to find them, it seems, is to just get out there and find them.  That’s the best way sometimes. 

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That wraps it for me.  Closing thought:  Topovan is awesome.  I’m going back.