From the Mother River

 Two furry hands groped under our door as another light fitting was smashed and another chair crashed to the ground outside. We were being held hostage in our room by a troupe of rather aggressive macaques. The veranda outside was a chaos of upturned furniture and shrieking monkey. Had we been able to step outside we could have overlooked the mighty Ganges, watched the pilgrims descending the ancient stone steps to take the holy waters. Slightly downstream, swarms of orange clad worshippers were making their way to the mother river, water containers dangling from gaudily decorated shoulder poles. They chanted and shouted, jostling past each other, unable to wait for their first touch, their first taste of this watery goddess. Considering the water is the depository for the nearby burning ghats (where human bodies are burnt before the remains are cleansed by the river), not to mention the destination for much of the city's sewage, we decided bathing in, let alone drinking, the water would not be wise. This didn't stop another army of pious germs flooding pilgrim-like into my weak and unsuspecting foreign gut. Though the monkeys had let us live, my poor culture-shocked tummy left me contained once more in our room. I lay there, guts and fan churning, and dreamt of cool mountain climes.

As always, Varanasi had slapped us in the face (and delivered a further blow to the stomach). It is a city where every journey to he shop involves pushing along tiny alleys, past vast Brahmin cows, harrying pilgrims and scabby dogs. As well as these obstacles, you also have to keep your eyes to the ground for it is slalom of cow shit, litter and scrawny puppies. The puppies in particular often blocked quick progress as Nic had to stop and stare adoringly at every one. Day by day, the heat brewed until it had exceeded 40 degrees (I'm not sure what that is in Fahrenheit but it's really about time you joined the metric age) and monsoon clouds boiled above the river. We needed to get out, we needed fresh air (and fluffier, less scabby puppies).

We took a train to Delhi, chatting all evening to the others in the carriage, dropping off to sleep to the rhythms of the train and awaking to the melodies of the chai-wallahs and snack men. We weren't in Delhi to see Delhi (we hav been many times before) but to take a bus north. The night was spent on a bus that twisted up and up into the Himalayan foothills, emerging into the Kullu valley as the sun rose behind the clouds that drifted endlessly down from green mountain slopes. The smell of pine and cannabis (it grows like nettles by the side of the road) drifted through the bus and expelled the fetid stuffiness of the plains from our lungs.

We are staying near Manali in a village of slate-roofed timber houses and slapdash concrete guesthouses. From our room we can see the opposite slopes of this vast green valley and, when the cloud momentarily slips from the summits, the snow-dusted peaks beyond. 

It's good to see India is still a gathering place for hippies, the traveller culture here has barely changed since the Seventies. Travellers still arrive Millets-clad and emerge two days later in baggy pantaloons, salwar shirts and beads. Even the original hippies are still here in their folds of tanned skin and Hindu scarves, their long hair receding toward balding scalps. Jim Morrison still stares gormlessly from tie-dyed T-shirts, 'No Woman No Cry' still plays endlessly from sound systems as old as the hippies themselves.

So we sit here in our cool mountain hippiedom, watching the local women pick their way down the hillsides with baskets of fresh-picked apples and the local men bathe in the natural hot springs (as always during our travels, it seems the men have the better side of the deal). We travel next deeper into the heavenly heights to a place not even the mighty monsoon can reach. We're going back to a world of dust and goats and wrinkle-faced peasants. Over the mountains and into the great wastes beyond...