Mark's Blog

Photo Gallery Now Live

I've finally got the opportunity to sort through my photos, pick the best and publish them into an online gallery. You'll find it here. I realise that this blog was left incomplete.

I only realised how many people had been following it after I got back to Dublin, where people were saying "you stopped for ages, there was nothing". I suppose over the course of the trip both my access to the internet and my inclination to go onto it decreased. Especially during the trip through Sangla and Spiti valleys, the remote Himalayan villages, which in many ways was the most magical part of the journey.

The Trip to Gomukh

The two months which followed Rishikesh were totally unlike the time which preceded it. I travelled north and lived the seasons in reverse. When I left Rishikesh, it was getting hot and muggy, like a Parisian August. Two weeks after leaving Rishikesh, I was standing at 3400 meters above sea level, surrounded by amazing peaks in a prolific, fresh snowfall which covered everything the eye could see. Simon and I followed the Ganga all the way to Gomukh, where the icy flow emerges first from underneath the glacier.

In Rishikesh

Rishikesh is the first stop on the way north into Utteranchal to Gomukh, the home of the Ganga's source. It's known as the Yoga capital of the world and it's also where The Beatles famously met with the Maharishi Yogi. It's a beautiful place beside the Ganga-ji, just as she turns from being a young to a mature river. Most westerners stay in Laxman Jula, on the other side of the river from the large Main town.

Westerners come to Rishikesh above all for the Ashrams and the Yoga. There are also those who come to party and this sets up a tension immediately between the stay-up-late crowd and the get-up-early crowd in any hotel you care to mention. Rishikesh is a holy town and therefore no alcohol, meat or eggs are officially available.

Dental Tourism

If you look at the x-ray on the right you'll see at the bottom right hand side a wonky tooth growing squarely against its neighbors. This had been due to come out for years before I came here. My Irish dentist made an appointment with an expensive clinic in Ranelagh for me before I left, which I had cancelled. It would have been under general anasthetic, the works. Neither the VHI or the clinic were able to give me a straight answer as to whether I was covered for this operation or not, so I seized this opportunity in Delhi to get it done here at a fraction of the Irish price and with plenty of time to recover properly.