RPE INDIA 2019 Day 4

  15th March 2019

With an early start we travelled in to the foothills of the Himalayas to the ancient holy city of Rishkesh where some of us braved the freezing waters of Ma Ganga and cleansed ourselves before taking part in a rooftop yoga session beneath a Bodhi tree. Well and truly stretched, but ultimately chilled, we took a gentle walk along the banks of the sacred river past numerous asrams and met many itinerant holy renunciants. The afternoon saw boat trip across the river and an amazing visit to the Asram of Maharishi Mahesh the spiritual guru of among others the Beatles in the late 1960’s. This was a strange and overgrown complex of meditation huts, accomodation and crazy graffitti dedicated to the moment that the Beatles were transformed from a jingly jangly pop quartet to a phenomenom that profoundly augmented hippy counterculture and as a result gave birth to the new age.