Rishikesh

Lots of people come here on pilgrimage both to take lessons from their gurus or to bathe in the ganges. Or for many long time residents, like this guy, just to do their laundry.

When we were there, we got to witness the Dessera festival.  This included the burning of this huge paper mache statue of Ravana the demonic ten headed bad guy of your nightmares.

It was "key stone cops" comedy watching the Indians put this up with nothing but ropes and man power.

A parade around town started the celebrations.

The rather gay-looking uncomfortable men at the front were followed around by boys dressed as monkeys woth swords.

This is a statue of Durga. She has now been worshipped for 9 days and nights. Despite this, she is about to be driven into the middle of the ganges and turfed into the water with the rest of the towns rubbish.

Coloured powder was slung around everywhere.

The nice pink really offsets Kojaks hair.

Jason took a wander down to the beach to suss out the plans for the festival.  He found rather alot of men who were very excited to pose in their underpants for photos.

NB: They asked Jason to take a photo of them and not the other way around.

The fireworks at the start of the evening were amazing.  It was rather un-relaxing however, to watch the locals get far too close to light each firework. Watching the fireworks blow-up in people's faces, was a little too regular an occurance.

Ravana the ten headed demon, was also laced with explosives so once he was set on fire, he exploded randomly until he finally fell over.

Safer than fighting with Pakistan we guess.

Claire is now wise enough to know not to white-water anything. Jason took a day away from our yoga courses to white-water kayak. This involved him returning exhausted, with cuts and bruises and lots of stories of huge waves and him needing to be rescued upside down from his boat by a local stoner.

Claire was glad that she didn't join Jason for the day.

This photo was taken after Jason's first drubbing in a rapid. On his 5th and last drubbing he fell at the beginning of the "golf-course" rapid and spent the next 100 metres half drowning after being hit in the face with his guides kayak whilst he was attempting to rescue him... the kayak was found a few hundred metres downstream.

But.... Jason can now eskimo roll most of the time.

Bloke outside a restaurant looks really bored whilst inticing people in. The spiritual city had a bit of capitalist tinge to it. We saw so many people cashing in on more than the odd crack pot tendency.

As with most highly religious places, people often come here looking for something they aren't going to find. For us, we didn't find beer as it is banned along with eggs and meat etc. For some others they find it by using this future predicting machine that appears to be a voltmeter, an ampmeter and a clock with some headphones. It is driven by the Indian equivalent of a "Barrow Boy" who promises to tell you your future for a small fee.