White water rafting, Beatles Ashram, and Cliff jumping.

Beatles Ashram

Ganges Cliff Jump

@ beach along Ganges

Well kids its about that time;
My trip is nearing to a end it its so hard to believe! After seeing all these new people come and go it is now my time to say goodbye!This weekend was my last weekend trip. We went to Rishikesh, and Hariwar. Which is supposed to be a 7hr drive, but we got lost trying to find our hotel and it turned into 9hrs. It was well worth the drive though! We stayed in our first 4 star hotel while here. Skye and I were in heaven! Soft pillows, clean sheets, and a real shower. We joked about wanting to just go back to our hotel room take a shower, and watch discovery chanel on our HD tv and skip the sun set prayer on the Ganges.
We started off our Sat morning going to the ashram The Beatles stayed @ in the mid 60's. It was "closed down" aka had a random man with crutches pretending to be a gaurd charging 50rs a head to get in. It was completely abandoned which made it so much cooler. Our guide said to watch out for elephants because they walk aroudn wild there. This ashram was in the jungle so i would beleive it. Giant yellow and black spiders, and monkeys flailing around everywhere. We saw a monkey with a missing hand and it was very sad. On our way back through the village there was a man pushing a cart who almost rolled over a cow laying on the ground. It wouldnt have been a life threating situation, but Paula took it upon herself to yell WATCH OUT and get behinde the cart and redirect the man away from the cow. Agian people stared at us, and i laughed and walked away. Later on in the evening we went to the Ganges river to watch the sunset ceremony. TONS of poeple where there and everything was very hectic. We bought these little flower baskets with candles in them and ran down towards the river before we missed the ceremnoy. We all each got wisked off by seperate preistto preform our Pooja. He would natter away somthing in Hindi say OM and get me to go OM. He prayed for my husband and kids and then lit my candle and i sent it off down the Ganges along with my prayer. The priest of corse asked me for 200RS, which he did not get. It was a very India experince Fast Fursious and someone demanding money for a free service.
Sunday Skye and I went white water rafting down the Ganges. Who knew it was possible? Not I. It was VERY enjoyable and clean. Because we were in Rishikesh it was a feed off from the mountain and not filled with dead bodies and floating baby corpse as is Varinasis Ganges. We met up with these two Brits Hamish and Jack, and tow girls from Mumbai whos names we didnt catch. The whole time the girls were holding onto the boat for dear life and the boys and us were joking around. The rapid were level 4 out of 5 so u can imagine what kind of situation was going on there. The instructor told us if we fell out the boat just to lay on our back until the rapids were over. I would have been very scary and hard not to drown if we had fallen out. We stopped about half way through our 16km ride and went cliff jumping. This one guy did a belly flop from the top of the cliff casue he hesitated, we think he broke his jaw. It was by far the worst belly flop i have ever seen in person. He called it a day after that. We then body surfed down the Ganges floating around until it was time to tackle our next rapids. Over all it was a very successful weekend and I had much fun with Skye!