Fly by Haridwar :)


Travelled to Haridwar for the weekend...spoilt brat me flew business class...and so did my family (aunts)...and stayed at the Radisson who did an outstanding job of looking after us...I have never seen a river so pure...and clean enough to see the blue waters of the river as it rippled by...attended the Ganga aarti at 6:30 am and finished my tour of duty with what I had set to accomplish...then went on to Rushikesh to see the Laxman Jhula...there is so much history behind this place...it was good of us to allow for a guide who took us around the various temples...saw the one faced rudraksha for the first time in my life...did some shopping for my family...returned to Haridwar...saw more temples there and then finally came back home just the way we had gone there.

The reason i write this is that i appreciate the town of Haridwar and its people for being simply wonderful toward tourists...they know that tourism is their bread and butter so they tend to look after them quite well...given that the administration is trying to create channels within Haridwar to distribute the flow of the river a bit so that maximum people have access to the river for their puja's, its no surprise that the ardh-kumbh mela goes by so smoothly.

Uttarakhand is a beautiful place...the forests are still intact and i can only imagine what the mountains look like in the rains...even on a day in the winter cold we saw monkeys, neelgai etc. By "cold" i mean really really cold...the water at 6:30am is quite an experience...i did not enter the waters as our pujari had arranged for a seating on the steps near the edge of the river...however...the steps were themselves so cold that one could have got a bite of that frost due to prolonged exposure at 6:30am.

The most amusing experience i had was that there was a mall right next to the hotel...and in spite of staying at the Radisson my aunt's (both americans) had dinner at the neighbouring MacDonald's because they were comfortable with the food there :). My poor phone rebooted seven times due to a faulty cover(didn't realize it at the time)...and when i told my aunts that the phone was "trash" (my mistake) i was informed the next day that an iphone 6 was on its way from the US...!!! This is why i never say anything to anyone :) I got in visual touch with cousin's after an interval of fifteen years thanks to the face-time app on my aunt's phones. All in all a decent time.







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