Трохи фоток сміття та лайна з краю священного міста.
Approaching Haridwar in a sleeper. A train stopped for some reason, and our window stopped right near lovely conical piles of manure.
Трохи фоток сміття та лайна з краю священного міста.
Approaching Haridwar in a sleeper. A train stopped for some reason, and our window stopped right near lovely conical piles of manure.
It was only here in Haridwar — on our sixth day in India — that I got culturally acclimatized at last. This new understanding was helping a lot. We moved quickly through the crowd of train station sellers who were literally pinching the clothes in order to get some attention. I calmly answered «no, thanks» and wasn't feeling afraid that I offend them. If you start feeling like this in India, then you are ready for Varanasi. Don't go there not acclimatized.
We failed to see Haridwar properly. Our plan was only a quick visit to the Mansa Devi hillside temple, and move over to Rishikesh. As a result, we only saw piles of rotting garbage and feces instead of the numerous bridges, quays and canals of the city center. Don't be us.
A train passenger told us that Haridwar was a sacred city like Varanasi. He was right — we saw comparable piles of decaying waste in these two cities. See for yourself. People didn't seem to care, and dried their washed clothes over this garbage bed.
We headed to the Mansa Devi ropeway. Upon reaching it, we found a very long queue of people, and joined it.
There was a bazaar at the top, and the path to the temple was wet and slimy from something soapy, my guess being that it was a mixture of spewed saliva and soaps of several colors from light turquoise to black. Indians seemed to be fine with it, some women even stepped into that barefoot and continued into the temple as if nothing happened.
I did not go inside the temple, only my company did. I went to a hillside viewpoint instead. There was a distant view of the place where Ganga channel starts with the Bhimgoda dam. I became one of a perhaps very small amount of idiots of this planet who missed the opportunity to visit the part of the city near the dam...
The mountains here are the Sivalik ridge of the outer Himalayas. This knowledge made me diverge from the main path and onto a less traveled one in order to be able to tell the friends that «I've been to some Himalayas». Hold your horses, said India. The path was no more than a toilet. Hello, outer Himalayas! Nice to meet you!
It was strictly prohibited to take photos of this queue and the labyrinth of the ropeway's entrance. I did take one because I got acclimatized to India and not scared anymore. The man who stared into the camera for some reason, saw the limited possibilities of one of us and kindly offered to let us go ahead of him in the queue. We did accept the offer, because he insisted, and the language barrier existed. I appreciated his gesture, despite the fact that it was a drop in the ocean — we skipped one place, but there was more than a hundred remaining. Anyway, the queue was not too slow. Thank you, the unknown man, if you are somehow reading this!
That's all I got from Haridwar. My advice will be the following: take into the account that Haridwar rikshas have bigger cabins that the ones in Delhi, or Agra, or Jaipur, and therefore they are not very willing to take less than three people. Or you can pay for three, bien sur.
On our way back from Haridwar to Delhi, we did not find the PNR chart anywhere to learn the number of our train car. Decided to visit the Chief Ticket Inspector. He was a kind man in traditional clothes, who got our seat numbers from his database. He was very vocal to criticise the online ticket sales (well, how else could we buy them being 4500 km away?). He was telling lots of important things, but the language barrier was a high one...
We left to walk back and forth on the platforms. Saw an eatery and ate the cheapest food in our whole life there: a metallic plate with sections of boiled rice, dahl, two sauces — sweet and hot, and five chapati costed us USD 0.5 — many times cheaper than anywhere else in India. A bargain even despite half of the food was not to my taste at all.
It turned out that while we were eating, the Chief Ticket Inspector was scouting all the platforms in search of us just to check that we got his instructions right! Upon meeting us at last, he took us to our train while it was still not open for boarding, opened the needed car for us and showed us our damned seats. I'm forever grateful for such a gesture, dear Chief Ticket Inspector!