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By Sam Oppenheim So I decided to re-visit the source of the Ganges. Traveling with Shekhar made the bumpy crowded shared jeep more comfortable. From Uttarkashi we found transportation to Gangotri and then hiked the 14 kilometers to Bhojbhasa, retracing my footsteps I had made a month before with Edwin. (See travelogue 10) ![]() ![]() ![]() This time it was possible to hike beyond Bhojbhasa. On the second day Shekhar and I hiked to Gaumukh: the 'cow's face'. This is the glacier which is the source of the Ganges river and is receding at the amazing rate of 20-30 feet a year due to global warming. The hike to it began easy, but eventually we found ourselves traversing terrain straight out of a post-apocalyptic sci-fi movie. The last kilometer was spent clamoring over rocks and silt in a cold desert created by the fast retreat of a glacier. The landscape is known as a 'Glacial Moraine' and it is as beautiful as it is alien: crowned in the distance by a sheer wall of bluish ice, cracked like an accordion, moving in geological time, expanding and contracting, shedding outer layers like a sliced cheese. Sometimes the glacier dangerously explodes when a million-year old air pocket expands in heat and shreds ice splinters, which are spit across the valley in front of the glacier. ![]() ![]() The most difficult climb I have ever done was that afternoon when we went up a steep face of a waterfall. The glacial silt that was the walls' main foundation is so fine it blows into your eyes in the wind, and shifts under every footstep. Rocks came down all around you as you climbed up, although amazingly nobody got hurt and one old woman and old man climbed up it on all fours with looks of crazed anguish on their face. I hoped they would turn around to safety. But with determination unlike that I normally witness they scaled the waterfall behind me and I greeted them from the top. Actually above Gaumukh there is not much to see besides dirt and rocks. After the monsoon the region blooms with seasonal rare flowers and herbs, but now after winter and a month before the monsoon, it was a cold rocky desert with a river flowing over it and into a waterfall disappearing beneath the shifting sands and into the belly of the glacier to form the Ganges. Luckily we encountered a nice sadhu who lives in silence upon the glacier in this region, Tapovan. Tapovan means 'place of Tapas' (austerities) and therefore he was following the tradition of meditation and austerities performed living on top of a glacier. Shekhar was exhausted, unwilling to go farther, and ate chapattis and drank warm water made by the sadhu, while I ate two chapattis and climbed alone up a further rocky cliff to explore Ghandarvan: 'the abode of heavenly beings' an aquamarine mountain lake above Tapovan. ![]() After those two mountain pilgrimages and experiences which I cannot quite express in words, what could I do with my last days in India? I had to re-enter the world of man and leave the world of god. I had to spend nearly three days continuously traveling to make it to Delhi for my flight to London. I had the good fortune of traveling with Shekhar, we discussed what we had left behind and made plans to return in one year, perhaps with supplies and a tent to meditate in silence for a week in the place where I truly felt like a guest of god, no longer surrounded by all that makes me sick of the world, no longer distracted by money, men, women, and all the normal human urges. I wasn't hungry, tired, or really even very much myself, I was elevated up there to a sense of being I only wish I could feel all the time. Coming back to Rishikesh and Mussoorie on my way to a train to Delhi was odd. First I ate a delicious meal at Mukti's my favorite restaurant, and in an amazing coincidence sat down across from a familar face: We began talking and discovered we knew each other from Columbia University, he was Matt, Vipin's roommate from freshman year - also seeking spirituality in India. Then being in Mussoorie was awkward, I wanted to say goodbye to all my old friends, but I also felt like an outsider, for I had already said goodbye a month before. I felt ghostly, passing though a place I had called home, on my way to another place to explore in Europe, but part of me remained in the mountains, and none of me was certain where I really was. ![]() ![]() If my prediction holds true my next travelogue will be more normative and less interesting. I may really enjoy myself in Spain, but it won't be comparable to the different states of awareness I found in the Himalayas of India. Perhaps I will find time to climb a mountain and experience my inner nature again, or perhaps once I return to Starbucks and Silverware at every meal I will have distanced myself from my own nature too much to escape with just a few days in nature. I imagine it might require at least two weeks away from culture to finally feel free of all the bonds and restrictions modernity and society places on your self. It seems to reinforce your sense of ego, rather than helping you to escape it like living in India, or in nature does. Note: all the photos did not fit - here's some more! |