Jeepers - sounds like it's been a while since I've found any place with convenient email. Shame really as it has been so full on it's been unreal.
We spent a few days at Pune (spelled "Poonah" in the old British days but pronounced "Pooneh") and that was actually really nice. I started the habit of wandering around the streets really late at night because we were having dinner so late and I really wanted it to digest well - plus I was kinda curious, especially as we usually spend no time in the cities. It's amazingly safe on the streets, though odd having so many people out at midnight wandering around for goodness knows what reason. Funnily, one of the few times in Pune we had a spare half day when we weren't visiting temples, they chartered a bus to go around shopping and it turned out to be a minor disaster. The "shops" were the same touristy stuff I was getting rather tired of (silk scarves, carving of elephants etc) and I was getting such an oppressive feeling that I decided to cut it short and walk back to the hotel, seeing that I knew my way around the town better than everyone else. Then I heard later that the others had met some slightly aggessive people on the street with sticks as they headed back to the bus. I guess that little expedition was just ill-fated from the start.
Amazing how much stuff some of the ladies have been buying!!! I have been looking at things but I must be setting the bar pretty high as most stuff just doesn't appeal. However there were some Nepalese tanka wall-hangings that were simply incredible which a few people bought lots of. Amazingly detailed Buddhist fine paintings on canvas with lovely silk borders - and often using real gold paint! All seemed a bit too complicated to me and I don't know the Buddhist deities too well, so I passed on it, though I do have the guy's card and he is keen to sell as much as he can overseas of course. Was mind-blowing just being shown all his stock. This is the kind of thing here, though the picture looks nothing like the quality we saw:
One lady on the tour who owns a New Age store in the US bought 20 of them at an average of US$100 each. She was very pleased :)
Ok - from Pune we visited all eight of the very famous Ashta vinayaka temples - eight very special temples devoted to Shri Ganesh. It's said to be a great blessing to visit any of the temples and we visited all eight in one pilgrimage. They are all scattered out in the middle of nowhere, so visiting each one meant bumping around in the dusty country roads for hours at a time. Have a look on the excellent page below - the story is that there are eight incarnations of Ganesh and each one was for a different time period. The current one is Siddhi Vinayaka with his left turning trunk, which is why there's the importance placed on checking the trunk whenever you buy a little statue of him.
The statues are all very um... stylised, which really threw me initially. But I hear that each one is hewn from a piece of rock which looked like Ganesh, so hence the different styles - some short and squat, others taller etc. All red too! Have bought a few little statues of them, but mostly pictures.
At each of the temples, we queued until we got up to the sanctum sanctorum, the holy of holies, where the statues is kept. Each statue has been the focus of puja rituals for such a long time that being in the presence of one imparts a weird kind of energy. I didn't often notice it as much as the others until I started doing an energy visualisation linking myself to the statue and then I could feel it quite well. At one temple in particular, we all stumbled out as spaced out as if we'd been on drugs! And I can assure you there's no dope being smoked or wafted anywhere we've been. Quite a new experience for me....
Then we zipped off to Delhi and unfortunately the last day at Pune I decided I was totally invincible and decided to break the number one food rule and had some cane juice from a street vendor. Well, I did survive, but honestly, I thought for a while that the trip was over, my diarrhoea was so bad! Like zero warming!!! Diarrhoea and total wooziness & light-headedness - much like campylobacter but luckily with no tummy cramps. I hit all the pills I had (including the Immodium which didn't seem to work) and finally the Russian lady on the trip gave me some killer diarrhoea medication she'd picked up from Stanford which knocked it dead. My Indian friend gave me lots of advice on the phone and said that the cane juice vendors are the dodgiest things in India - people catch all sorts of stuff from them! So that's another of my nine lives gone. But 24 hours later I was up on my feet and ready to head to the Himalayas.
We took the train and bus to Rishikesh (the train station at Delhi was a nightmare!!!) but made it ok. The mountains were nothing like I imagined in the foothills and we were very entertained to see monkeys in the trees. I scared them off when we stopped for a leak but one of the other gals was confronted by an angry male and she was terrified!! Visiting Rishikesh and standing in the Ganges was a lovely moment, and I chatted briefly to a couple of sadhus who had the biggest smiles in the world. No wonder - all the street vendors seemed to be selling very large chillum marijuana pipes and the tour guide said that yep, a lot of the sadhus (serious spiritual ascetics) were big pot smokers. Nice vibes though! Funnily enough the tour leader wouldn't stand in the Ganges because he said you could catch bad stuff even by dipping your feet in it!!! Well, I hadn't come all that way for nothing... But I was stunned when the Danish lady took a sip of the water! Very brave... BTW she had diarrhoea for most of the trip, but I think it was all from back in Bangalore.
Sadly the people who live around Rishikesh don't seem very happy at all! No smiles from the vendors and honestly their little townships seemed quite hellish to me for being near such a sacred place. However the main sacred spots at the river itself and the really high peaks. So from Rishikesh we wound our way very slowly up the narrow mountain roads all the way to Auli, at an altitude of about 9000 feet if I remember. And there we camped in nice big tents for a few days with the now peaks all around - including the second highest peak in India, Nanda Devi, a truly glorious sight.
There at the camp site we performed 5 fire rituals or yagnas, where each one was devoted to a different aspect of god. In each yagna, we set up a fire and the 1008 names of the divine aspect were chanted as we offered rice and ghee into the flames. Great for me as I am such a fire bug, but hard for the asthmatics!!!
Thomas the group leader said that we were releasing a ton of karma with the rituals and while I was none the wiser, the more psychic in the group had interesting visions of the Shankaracharyas watching the ceremony and the spirits of the mountains were said to be very appreciative. As Thomas said he got from one meditation after, a spirit of one of the mountains rued "Nobody does this kind of thing any more!"
The altitude was a minor problem for me as I probably didn't drink enough and woke up with some nasty headaches. But wandering around the area we saw some lovely landscape - very much like good old NZ funnily enough - except there are lots of wild rhododendron trees there, though none of them are flowering right now. We all got sunburned too, as the air is so thin. Luckily I just got my forearms toasted and they aren't too bad.
From there the bus rides became very arduous, even more so than for the 8 Ganesh temples and we finally hiked up to Babaji's cave. (Bbaji from Yogananda's Autobiography of a Yogi) That was quite a day and for some reason when I finally made it to the cave, I had a serious pain in my prostate. I couldn't understand it as it's not like I'd cycled up on a 10-speed or anything and after we did our mantra initiations there, I noticed it had disappeared. Thomas said later that this was a great blessing and I had received some serious healing. Sounds good to me! No pain, no gain I guess. It was amazing the doors that have been opened to us on this trip and the swami who looks after the cave sat with us as we did our final fire ceremony to Shiva at the temple below.
Well from there we survived an arduous overnight train ride back here to Delhi and it's pretty much over now. The train was terrible though and a few poor souls were sitting in a bad place where the air conditioning was spewing damp air all over them, and they felt really awful and moved as fast as they could. Funny thing is, even though it is pretty warm in India, most of us turn off the air con as soon as we get into our hotel rooms - it just ain't necessary.
Ok - my hour's up so time to look for some more rudraksha malas and maybe a small marble Ganesha!
