Rishikesh

Rishikesh is the place where the Ganges stops being a mountain river and becomes an idea. For most of its course above here the river is a Himalayan torrent, cold and green and hemmed in by forested ridges; a little downstream at Haridwar it spreads out onto the plains and begins its long, sacred journey across northern India. Rishikesh sits exactly on that threshold — at the foot of the Garhwal Himalaya, around 340 metres above sea level, on the right bank of the river as it emerges from the hills. That in-between geography is the whole character of the town. It is a Hindu holy place of the first order and, at the same time, the adventure-sports and yoga capital of the country, and the two identities coexist within a few hundred metres of each other along the water.

The spiritual pull is ancient. Rishikesh takes its name from the sages (rishis) who are said to have meditated on these banks for millennia, and it has long been treated as a gateway — both literally, as the road-head for the Char Dham pilgrimage to Yamunotri, Gangotri, Kedarnath and Badrinath, and figuratively, as a place people come to change. The town is dense with ashrams, temples and meditation centres; the riverbank ghats fill twice a day with pilgrims bathing in the icy, fast-moving water; and every evening the Ganga Aarti — a ceremony of fire, chant and floating lamps offered to the river — draws crowds to the water's edge. Rishikesh is also, by long-standing rule, a strictly vegetarian and alcohol-free town: the sale of meat, fish and eggs has been prohibited here since the 1950s, and alcohol is not sold, which gives the place a distinctive calm that surprises first-time visitors.

Then there is the other Rishikesh. Since the 1960s — and especially after the Beatles came to study transcendental meditation at Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's ashram in 1968 — the town has been a magnet for seekers from around the world, and it has grown into what it now unabashedly calls the "Yoga Capital of the World." The lanes above the river are thick with yoga schools running teacher-training courses, meditation retreats, ayurvedic clinics, and a well-developed café culture catering to a long-staying international crowd. Layered on top of all this is India's busiest white-water scene: the stretch of the Ganges upstream is one of the country's premier rafting rivers, and the hills around town host India's highest bungee jump and a tangle of ziplines, cliff jumps and giant swings.

The result is a town that reads very differently depending on where you stand. On the ghats at dawn it is pure pilgrimage; in a riverside café at Tapovan it is a backpacker haven; on the water at Shivpuri it is an adrenaline resort. Most visitors come for one of these and leave having brushed against all three. It is worth coming with an open mind and a willingness to slow down: Rishikesh rewards a morning yoga class and an evening aarti far more than a checklist of sights, and its best moments — the light on the river, the sound of temple bells over rushing water — are the kind you cannot photograph.

Practically, Rishikesh suits a wide range of trips. It works as a two- or three-day break from Delhi, as the spiritual counterweight to the mountains at the start or end of a Garhwal journey, as a rafting weekend, or as a base for a multi-week yoga course. However you come to it, give the river its due — see at least one Ganga Aarti, cross to the far bank on foot, and if the season allows, get on the water — and leave room for the quieter temples and viewpoints in the surrounding hills that the day-trippers skip.