Satanee tonbpai, satanee Rishikesh

So the time came to move to India for the next adventure. I would spend there a month and a half studying yoga. I flew to Bangkok where I met Krystle, a former teacher from school who became my travel partner. A few hours later we arrived in Delhi’s airport. Shail, from the yoga school had arranged for a driver to pick us up and bring us to the train station. On the way to the station we appreciated the buoyance of India. Animated and colorful streets, strong smells, constant honking, loud voices…

We had to catch a train to Haridwar and then a bus to Rishikesh. We shortly realized that the station did not cater tourists, as we were the only Western people there. Many people waited on the platform, sitting on the ground. Inside of the station there were no restaurants of coffee shops (except for a McDonald’s!) and we were four hours early, so we ventured to a restaurant outside. There we had our first Indian meal: vegetarian rice. It was deliciously spicy. Then we walked to the platform from where our train would depart. It was dirty and it smelled strongly of urine. Vendors, men in funny suits, women carrying big packages on their heads and kids with dusty faces and running buguers walked up and down. We observed everything with curiosity. The only thing that bothered us a little was a couple of drunken men that were vehemently trying to tell us something we could not understand. Thankfully, they did not stay too long.

The experience riding an Indian train was very different than the one I had in Thailand. In the overnight train from Bangkok to Chiang Mai an attendant comes a couple of hours after departure and turns your seat into a comfortable bed. In this train you had to make your own bed; there were no attendants or anyone to help you figure out how things worked. In one small space six bunk beds, three on each wall, fit. I got the middle one, while Krystle got the one on top. An old man was in the bed below mine. Since there was not enough space to sit, we laid down right away. I immediately fell asleep and woke up at three in the morning. We were supposed to arrive at six but since I had managed to lose my phone in the way to Phuket’s airport I did not have an alarm clock and was scared to miss the station.

When we got off the train we felt a big sense of accomplishment. The next challenge was to find the bus that would bring us to Rishikesh. The bus station was hectic and we could not read any signs. We discovered that, instead of numbered platforms with buses that left to different destinations, at Haridwar’s terminal all buses were mingled and waiting to depart whenever they could make it to the exit driveway. A man assigned to each bus shouted the name of the destination, thus alerting the passengers which bus they had to take. The bus was very run down and filthy, again not a tourists’ choice. For about an hour we got a glimpse of our new surroundings through its windows: dusty roads where people and animals strolled lazily under the rising sun on the footsteps of the Himalayas.

At the Rishikesh bus terminal we asked a rickshaw driver to take us to the Dayanan Ashram. And that is how we arrived to our new home.