I started this post but didn't have time to finish it all in one sitting, so here is a post from Sunday -- more to come on the rest of the trip:
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We are all now still in Rishikesh.
Yesterday, we wandered around the town, ate lunch overlooking the Ganges, relaxed, and walked about 5 km up the road to see a tremendous waterfall. The whole day was full of incredibly interesting people.
As we were trying to find an ATM earlier in the morning, we met a kid from Georgia and a woman from Toronto. Brandon, from Georgia, was just finishing up a 3-week yoga course in Rishikesh and was about to go home. The woman, whose name I don't remember, was just travelling through Asia until she got to Singapore to meet up with her boyfriend in December. No plan. No companion. Just travelling.
Later in the day, we wanted to go visit a waterfall that we had heard about. After Aaron was nearly attacked by a monkey (his fault), we reached a sort of trail/non-trail that an Italian guy had told us about at breakfast. We had asked some women earlier, on our way there, where exactly the waterfall was, but they said that they couldn't make it up because there was a guard with a gun saying there was a wild elephant. At the head of the trail sat 6 or 7 French punk-types from Tours, but no armed guard, so up we went. About five minutes up, we found some lovely evidence of an elephant which must have been there earlier -- but since it wasn't steaming, we decided to continue up the trail. Once we reached a fork in the trail, the last 'bad omen' hit us in the form of a man screaming. I turned to Jackie, Jackie looked at me, Aaron was looking at something else, as he usually is, and we decided to walk back down. When we ran into the French punk-types again, as they were heading up, and who had now been joined by two Brits, we changed our minds again, turned around, and joined the larger group back up the trail. Aaron said to one of the Brits 'Well, if we're all trampled by an elephant, it will probably be on the BBC,' to which they replied 'Oh that's funny and quite likely, seeing as we work for the BBC.'
When we reached the waterfall, it turns out that the screaming man was actually this dude having a religious experience under the waterfall. He was also partial to growling and being generally odd. The waterfall was beautiful and well worth the going up and down and back up again. The water was clean, the colors were vibrant (a far cry from the monotonous, though likewise beautiful, desert) and it was a very nice find. After the waterfall, we walked back with the Brits, Howard and Jack, and talked the whole way. It turns out that Howard has the coolest job ever and frequently reports with Jack, who has the second coolest job ever. Howard was posted in Bangladesh until quite recently and just moved to Delhi. He's reported from Japan, Bangladesh, India, Uganda, the US and, of course, Britain. Jack has filmed him in most of those places, but from what I understand travels less. If you want to see their reports, look up 'Howard Johnson and Jack Garland' or one of their names and 'couchsurfing.'
Later that evening, we went to a restaurant near our hotel for dinner. As Jackie and Aaron were sitting down at a corner table, an older gentleman with a book, long grey hair and robes was just sitting down at the same time. When I joined them, they were talking and eventually we just invited the man to join us for dinner. As it turns out, he was also an interesting character. Living in Rishikesh, he had become a Hindu monk when he was 17 and somewhere along the way, his guru had told him to study anything and to do it anywhere and everywhere. He told us about how he followed Martin Luther King Jr. around in the 60s, how he had devised a plan for peace in the Middle East (which involved moving Palestinians to the Sinai Peninsula and creating a new state) and sent it to Arafat (??), went to Thailand every year for visa purposes but has another life there, created a space-dancing computer game, studied in Germany for a number of years, knows some professor at Harvard really well....and that was only what we learned over the course of a few hours. I know it all seems a bit far-fetched and I'm not sure how much of it was true, but regardless, the conversation was phenomenally interesting. He has a website, which Jackie, Aaron and I will soon visit, where he posts his ideas and his photography.
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More to come on Delhi and making it back to Amman.
Love,
anneke
Ha I liked the BBC people...
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