Rishikesh

Rishikesh has been a place of retreat for far longer than it has been a destination. Its name — from rishi, seer — reflects a tradition of ascetics settling where the Ganges emerges from the mountains, and the town appears in Puranic literature as a stop on the pilgrimage route north to Badrinath and Kedarnath. For most of its history it was a staging post: pilgrims rested, bathed at the ghats, and walked on.

The modern ashram town took shape in the twentieth century. Swami Sivananda founded the Divine Life Society here in 1936 and, unusually for the time, taught and published in English — which is much of why Rishikesh rather than Haridwar or Varanasi became the place foreign students came to. His students went on to found lineages of their own, and by the 1950s the west bank held a cluster of teaching ashrams.

In February 1968 the Beatles arrived at Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's Transcendental Meditation ashram and stayed several weeks, writing much of what became the White Album. The visit turned a regional pilgrimage town into a global one almost overnight. The ashram itself was abandoned in the 1990s and its graffiti-covered meditation cells now sit inside the Rajaji reserve, open to visitors.

What followed is harder to romanticise. Rishikesh now hosts hundreds of teacher trainings, and the quality range is enormous — from ashrams teaching in six-month terms to four-week certificate mills. The town also carries an alcohol and meat ban, a March yoga festival that draws tens of thousands, and a whitewater rafting industry sharing the same river. All of it coexists, not always comfortably.

Come in October to March. April and May are hot, and the monsoon from June closes much of the river.