Ganga Begins

Graptolite's Sailing Log
Martyn Pickup & Heike Richter
Thu 8 Dec 2016 18:11

Haridwar, Uttarakhand, India. 8th December 2016

 

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Had a look at the Ganges first thing in daylight from the hotel terrace. Heaps of marigolds and other vegetable offerings to Ganga Maa were floating past at a fair clip. Had breakfast in the Haveli Hari Ganga but veggie Indian breakfasts take some getting used to.

 

Having decided that it would be suicidal to try and drive myself here, I got the cycle rickshaw wallah to take me to rent a car and driver for the day. We drove off into the mountains through Haridwar and Rishikesh on to Devprayag at the start of the River Ganges. Sounds easy enough but it was a nail-biting ride.

 

Every few minutes there is something happening on the road in front that is either utterly illegal in Europe and/or dangerous and inconsiderate enough to cause serious road-rage. Here it is seen as just normal polite driving. A bit scary when going off the road can means a sudden stop about 500 metres straight down. It’s not possible to fret about all these incidents all the time and I’ve found that after a while a kind of fatalism kicks in which is probably what is at the heart of Hinduism. The honking still gets on my nerves but I have a theory that it is a form of Morse code which can be used to communicate around blind bends and from blind spots about how much you are indifferent to causing a collision. It may also be a kind of bat-squeak-like sonar which allows bumper to bumper driving without the need to look.

 

Aside from the traffic and the state of the roads the drive was very interesting with spectacular scenery and all kinds of wildlife like brown rhesus macaques and grey langurs fighting and sleeping and orange Hari Krishna trekking. Rishikesh was a colourful place with pink temples and ashrams built up on either side of the wide river. The roads were jammed with big blue tuk-tuks, brightly painted trucks and wedding cars decked out with strings of marigolds. Unfortunately I had to give the ruined ashram, where the Beatles hung out in 1968, as miss as it was on the wrong side of the river.

 

After a few hours driving we reached Devprayag. This is a tiny little place perched on rocks at the confluence of two fast flowing rivers that come out of glaciers further up into the Himalayas than I had time or energy to reach. At the point these two rivers, the Bhagirathi and the Alaknanda, join the river becomes Ganga. A complicated Hindu thing where the goddess Ganga and the Ganges River are the same entity. So the quest to the mouth of the river begins! I dipped a toe in.

 

On the way back we stopped off at the Rajaji National Park elephant orphanage. I suspect it wasn’t a tourist spot as there were keep-out signs. There was a baby elephant there that really wanted a cuddle. It was a pity that it felt like stroking a doormat.

 

In the early evening I went to Har Ki Pauri in Haridar with an American couple I met in the hotel, who were there for a friend’s wedding. Har Ki Pauri is where they have a big Hindu river-worshipping ceremony every day called Ganga Aarti. You buy a “flower pot” for 20 rupees (about 30 cents) which is a leaf basket filled with red and gold flowers and a candle in it. As the sun sets there are about a thousand people all singing, banging drums and waving stuff on fire. Then comes time to get a blessing and launch your own burning basket into the Ganga. It was gone in seconds but I expect to see it again further down the river.

 

M