The flying carpet diary: Haridwar

In Rishikesh we took a quick desicion to continue our route towards Nepal, as long as there is still not that cold near Himalayas. Also our hotel receptionist, a nepalese guy, approved the idea and gave us some advise. The best option seamed to be to enter Nepal from the most western border and go there by night bus from Haridwar.

So that was it ! We went to Haridwar.

Haridwar is another holy hindu city, also located on the banks of Ganga. This is the place where Ganga is leaving mountainous landscape behind and entering to the hot plains.

When in Rishikesh we felt safe and sound in the tourist hub, then once again we were back in real India - hectic traffic, air and noise pollution, streets full of animals, all weird kinds of people, beggars and everything else you can only see in India...

We wanted to leave our big backbags to the bus station cloack room, but cloack room there seamed to be together with toilet and the guy in charge of the place did not seam very competent, so we went to try our luck in train station cloack room. There we were told that as long as you don't have your own chain and padlock to tie the bags, they will not accept to guard them...
Finally one hotel took our bags for 50 Rs fee, which we luckily did not had to pay in the end.

Branko went up to the hill temple to see the view to Ganga. The main attraction up there was not the view however, but the monkey thieves who stole the offerings (cocoanuts with some flowers and rice), that people had bought down and took up to the temple to give these to gods.

banana leaf boats for the river Ganga

in the ghats of Ganga

When waiting for the closing ceremony of Ganga, an event that takes place every day after sunset, a pilgrim family from Mumbai district approached us and after a little chat we got a friendly invitation to their home and a chance to see rural India. After seeing the "rural India" between Delhi and Rishikesh, we were not that facinated about the idea however...

The closing ceremony was ......crowdy first of all. We did not see the first part of it, but the last part consisted of people thronging near a little shrine, fighting with elbows if nessecary, each one wanted to get his/her blessing and light the candle to offer it to Ganga.

Finally it was time to catch the bus. In the bus we met three Czech tourists who tought us that in the back of the bus it jumps much more than in the front of the bus. It was good advice, especially because the night in the bus was ahead.

It was a memorable night, but even more memorable was the place where we reached early in the morning before the dawn. Bus conductor woke us up "This is Banbassa !"

It looked like a place you can only see in some Hollywood catastrophy movies after all Earth has been destroyed and only few have been survived - no houses, just huts, rubbish bon-fires everywhere, people around them warming their hands, rovering dogs....

After adapting to the situation, young rickshaw drivers offered us to take us to the border for ridiculously low price (of course this ridiculously low price came after many attempts to give us ridiculously high price), but since it was still dark and the border point was supposed to be opened little later, we decided to walk few km-s through the tropical forest to see the miraculous event of the light slowly slowly taking over the darkness.