Kathman(over)du(e), Rishikesh

Nepal turned out to be more of a visa-run than a true destination. I stayed in the capital for the whole five days it took me to arrange my India travel documents, wandering around buying souvenirs and eating whatever caught my eye. I got my visa on the fifth afternoon and bused to the Indian border overnight. The Suanuli frontier was a dingy arch over a mud road painted with the words "Welcome To India" where, wandering past the cows and rickshaws, I managed to slip past the nondescript Nepalese immigration office and slip into India unofficially. Once the Indian immigration officials saw I had no Nepalese exit stamp, they simply pointed back to the arch, where I got stamped out of Nepal.

So, technically, I've been to Nepal and India twice.

From the border to Gorakhpur on a three hour bus, I spent the day at the train station and caught a sleeper to Delhi, arriving at 5:55 a.m. I woke up at quarter to seven the next morning, thoroughly befuddled by the freezing air conditioned night after having spent 24 hours on sweaty, jolting buses. By a stroke of luck, the train had only just pulled in to New Delhi Station, and I collected my bags in a daze and stumbled onto the platform. After spending another day stalking around the filth of the station, I caught an evening train to Haridwar and a trampoline-suspension bus from there to Rishikesh, collapsing into a hostel after scarfing down my first non-muesli meal in 48 hours.

The next morning, after a bitterly cold shower, I shouldered my bag and hiked a few kilometers through town along the Ganges to the Anand Prakash yoga ashram. Arriving a few minutes before lunch, I clomped through the door, met Britt in a procession of hugs, got assigned a room and a lunch tray, and settled in for what has become a week of yoga and vegetables.

Rishikesh, being a holy city, is entirely meat- and alchohol-free. On top of this, the ashram cafeteria serves only "satvic" meals, which excludes, among other things, garlic and onions (too "lusty"). In spite of this, the fare is delicious and plentiful, and the communal setting is a welcome relief from having a whole restaurant table to myself.

Monkeys scramble acrobatically across the two footbridges that span the Ganges here, and cows are omnipresent. The power fails regularly, and the afternoon heat is oppressive. But in the mornings, torrents of wind pour down from the Himalayas over the town, and in the evenings, the stars are in full view. It's not a bad place to spend a week, recovering from the harrying anxieties of travel, soaking up masala tea, reading, and swinging into downward facing dog a few times a day.

But Egypt and her pyramids await, so tomorrow I'll return to Delhi for a day of sights, then fly to Cairo early Monday to scratch a fifth continent off of my to-do list.