SIHI VISITS TO RISHIKESH AND HARIDWAR

Clean Himalayas

SIHI on the boat

SIHI at Chotiwala

Ganga River

The above photos are from our visit to Rishikesh and Haridwar for the past 3 days. Rishikesh is a beautiful city on the banks of the Ganges (Ganga), a holy city considered to be the gateway to the Himalayas. We took a trip upstream to see some caves, and stopped for a bit to dip our feet into the Ganges. We visited a number of temples and did some shopping in the city. We met with Bill and Susan, two Canadians who live in Rishikesh. Susan works with Clean Himalayas, which works to clean up some of the garbage in the area. on Friday morning, we helped Clean Himalayas clean up a section of road. During our stay, we stayed in a traditional style ashram. Our room had a traditional style washroom as well as a Western style one. It came complete with a traditional style dinning room, with signs (that were fully ignored) telling us to eat in silence.  The seating of course was on the floor.  I'm not sure any of us are quite sure what most of the food we ate was there was.  The fruit we had for the first breakfast was delicious, except it ran out and not all of us got some. Although we didn't see the elephants on our trip, we did see monkeys, cows, and monks (unusual sights for us!).  We also saw plenty of other vehicles from our car - so many that we got to experience a traditional Indian traffic jam.

Aarti at Rishikesh

Lord Shiva