The white house up the hill

Unless you are staying in an Ashram, Rishikesh is not as geared up for longer-term yoga students as Mysore is when it comes to accommodation. There is no Krishnamurthy or Shiva in orange robes to willingly help you on your way - for a small fee (one for the Mysore crowd).

So our search was pretty much ad-hoc, and pretty interesting. We spoke to anybody that might know anything about our finding a place with a kitchen, our own bathroom and hot water.  We saw: "the building site" a wonderful new apartment, but the only one finished in a whole block, with the JCB diggers and builders still working on all 4 sides of the apartment wall. There was the "shell up the mountain" beautiful location, but nothing in the place! Not even a kitchen sink. Then there was the one with the stinkiest bathroom, "Next," and the dark cavern one with no natural daylight.  It didn't help our progress that we were searching as the local holiday season ramps up. Even the hotels weren't willing to do us a reasonable deal for a longer-term stay.  We started to get disheartened.

Until finally we found "the white house up the hill". Which is in fact what we call it - we have no idea what the address actually is.

The white house up the hill

The white house is a private house where our landlord Navin, a pharmacist in a local hospital, lives. He rents out the upper floor of the house, and that's where we live. We don't have our own kitchen, but pay a little extra to use Navin's big kitchen, which has the benefit of being fully stocked, including a sandwich toaster and a blender! We also get to learn about and taste some new Indian dishes from Navin or his kitchen helper.

There is a huge great terrace outside our place, and another one upstairs with wonderful views of the mountains on both sides of the valley. 

Terrace view

We also share the place with four dogs (3 of which are rescued street dogs) and a cat. We're not sure of the dogs' names so we've made up our own: Norman the Doorman - so called because he mainly hangs around in the porch and greets us at the gate; 

Norman the Doorman

Blondie, due to her hair colour, and the fact that she's a little tough like Debby Harry of Blondie fame;

Blondie

Jimmy the 3-legged dog which is actually the name given to it by a previous English tenant who lived here and rescued it, and Jimmy is actually a girl;

Me and Jimmy on the terrace

Then there is the little white fluffy thing we have called ALFie, an acronym for Angry Little F…F… F… Fella.

ALFie

 The cat is just "ginger" and is way too cool to be given a cute name.

You dare call me tiddles

We know we are part of the family already as Jimmy left a dead pigeon on our door mat, and we were invited to a village wedding. 

So far so good. It is certainly the smallest space we have ever lived in during our 16 years of living together. But the outside terrace has become our enormous lounge and Navin is very generous with our using his dining area. Besides, our daily lives are currently very simple. The simpler the routine, the less you need, the less things we have, the less space we need.

Well…. we'll see if that still holds by next week