Along the way, holy men sit wrapped in orange robes on benches inscribed with ancient Sanskrit texts chatting and drinking tea. And everywhere are posters advertising yoga, meditation and self-transformation classes.
I'd booked my hotel ahead of time. Slightly up hill and away from Laxmanjhula's main drag, the Divya hotel boasted an Olympic pool-sized terrace with superb views of the river.
At $5 a night, I'd expected my room to be basic but was surprised to find it clean with a huge double bed, and a bathroom with 24-hour hot water.
Accommodations ran the gamut. Some travelers stayed in one-room wooden shacks where the hot water was delivered in buckets, or in yoga ashrams, communal centers where they were expected to chip in with the chores. At the other end of the scale was the five-star Ananda Spa, where rooms were upward of $450 a night.
I started each day sitting on the terrace with a glass of spicy tea and wrapped in a blanket to beat the morning chill, listening to the voices of children chanting prayers by the river.
That was followed by a 1 ½-hour yoga class, choosing from one of the countless styles on offer: Iyengar, which emphasizes alignment; Hatha yoga, a more fluid and dynamic style; and Kundalini, the latest craze in Rishikesh, said to "awaken a powerful energy force within."
The afternoons were for exploration. I spent hours down by the Ghats, the steps leading to the Ganges, where dozens of people sat or dozed or read or dipped in the river, inevitably falling into conversation with strangers. Indians, I found, wanted to talk about their country: about nationalism, corruption and politics. Westerners discussed spiritualism.
On another afternoon I explored the "Beatles' ashram," a vast overgrown garden of conical stone cottages better suited to Hobbits than Beatles, I thought. I popped my head into a few, hoping, perhaps to see a line from the White Album's "Dear Prudence" scrawled onto one of the walls.
I closed each day with yoga, but always with the same teacher, Surinder Singh, a Sikh from the northern state of Punjab. Singh's lyrical voice was often swallowed by his neatly trimmed beard, but the message as he exhorted us to "Reeeelax" after spending nearly three hours twisting our limbs into improbable animal-named poses was not lost.
Finally, I was beginning to see that the beauty in Rishikesh was that it had something for everyone.
