Finding oneself in a city other than Rishikesh

Again, I write on a bus. A bus out of Rishikesh and to Dehradun, where we will catch another bus to Mussoorie, a hill station.

A couple nights ago, after my last post about how excited we were to go do yoga with our guryogi in the foothills of the Himalayas, we did a little web surfing to check out our guryogi. It appeared like he was a rather famous yogi from the 60s/70s, so famous a woman had even written a book about him: The Serpent Rising by Mary Gardner. Our guryogi was apparently a womanizer, similar to Marishei, the yogi who The Beatles had spent time with in an ashram and who they later wrote a song about "You made fools of us."

Now, we didn't want to judge too much, as our guryogi was now in his 60s and from the book reviews it didn't seem like he had really done anything that would put us in danger. He had had a relationship, albeit an unhealthy one, with some woman from New Zealand who had set out to find herself. Yes, he might have been abusive and manipulative, but she could have left like we wish all battered woman had the capability to do. What was our guryogi going to do, try and dateus in the 3 days we would spend meditating with him?

We decided to sleep on it, and when we woke up yesterday disenchanted, we decided we had given Rishikesh a fair shot and we were high-tailing it out of there as fast as we could. So yes, we left Rishikesh, the yoga capital of the world, before doing one class of yoga. Don't worry though, we each managed to buy a new yoga mat and mat bag!

All I've learned about finding myself in Rishikesh, is that the best way for me to find myself, is to head to the nearest Ritz Carlton and spend the day in the spa. And since there's obviously no Ritz Carlton here in Rishikesh, and we all know what happened the last time we spent the day at the spa (Kerala) ... It was good-bye Rishikesh, hello something new.

And since no post can go without pictures... Here are some pictures of dogs (and Ale). The first is Dollie, a Great Dane who guarded our hotel in Rishikesh. 2. A stray puppy who wandered his way into a restaurant we were eating at and whom we both tried to shoo away (rabies!!) 3. Ale sitting across from me on the bus