Candles

On the Ganges.

An odd day here...well, not really in the context of other blips. Maybe a thoughtful day if that would be believable...being lulled into watching the sun drift across the sounds of water and the echoes of traffic..,getting lazy...time to move soon...too familiar...and today the heat arrived from the south, a sudden surge in temperature...

Started with Milo being burned badly for the bike crash, 10000 rupees, with the guy trying to charge him for bits untouched...royally ripped off I fear...
And then I got my ring, which I like....am sure that I was also ripped off....but not for too much I think...hope?

And then a walk down to the first bridge and the Beatles ashram...well technically maharishi mahesh yogi's...but...what an odd place..quite spooky, very sixties, mushroom shaped buildings, others had the look and feel of eastern Europe...bratisfughinlata on a good day...there's a certain sorrow in cement as it crumbles, an acceptance of impermanence maybe, an architectural lament...the jungle is reclaiming the buildings, the ragged edges of legend, and....to my eyes which at the moment are probably not the most trustworthy lens through which to view anything...it has become, almost, a metaphor for the sixties...or maybe better, the hippy dream which has now turned into a caricature of expected behaviour, uniformity and, dare I say, caste...whatever happened to the counter culture? Did it really grow up to become an accountant?

And once again to ramble through the mazed woodlands of incoherence I fear...

Hunter Thompson once wrote, beautifully, about standing on a ridge in the desert and watching the tide of the six tie turn and recede and, sitting in the ashram...wishing that I had brought the guitar and knew a Beatles song...this followed on from some of the other thoughts that I've been carrying upon this part of the trip....it feels like there has been a change, that the weather on the road has become notably colder, here you can see the different tribes gather, its not really so different from different ghettos and, in the last few days there's been an influx of the goa crowd and a remarkable change in the vibe of the place. It's grown harder...I think that there's a portion of this community who are, incessantly, inward looking...carrying a bastard hybrid of pseudo culture and arrogance to, almost/possibly, block out the local culture.... there's a route map which follows a trail of backpackerstani towns where you can buy all of the luxuries of home...this I struggle with and this tend to make it time to move on...

And I sound like some puritan on an ego trip....I don't know that my view holds any value, or coherence come to that, consistency never waa a forte, but I think that, sometimes my ilk are an anachronism in these places. I think of Kerouac and the pranksters and, to be fair, I am more romantically inclined towards the beats than those who followed. Zen is, for me, more interesting than Siva, saffron more so than orange....but even more so now it feels like a minority view...almost biographical....

And I feel utterly uninspired, camera in hand...today only the 35mm....the 50 had an accident in Varanasi and is not quite reliable any more, broken but curious would be one way to describe it....and the zoom feels bland...but at sunset there were many more candles set off to float down the Ganges and I still had the camera in my bag....

If only it were so simple ...no direct bus to shimla....12 hours at best...which is also the time it take to get to pushkar...and so I think next stop is the desert a and then north for a few days...and am surprised at how, relatively short the distances are up here...none of those southern 20+ hour journey....but arrival time re still barking mad...pushkar is 0330...but....