If you ain't got no money get your broke ass home

That was close... down to Rs. 600 in cash and unable to find a bank machine that would take our debit cards. I thought I was going to have to pack my shit up and drop my last rupees on a bus to Delhi and go home.

But no. We found a money-changer. No problems, no heartbreak.

This would have been an especially terrible time to run out of money. There's only 1 day left in my Dharamsala countdown! Tomorrow night is my hideous 14-hour bus ride from Dehra Dun. It takes a hell of a place to deserve a 14-hour bus ride on a North Indian government bus, but I think Dharamsala might be that kind of place.

My mom points out via email that I haven't updated in a while. I thought I mentioned that I was headed for a week to Gangotri to do a trek to the source of the Ganges at the Gaumukh glacier. Apparently I didn't.

Well, that's where I was, and it was even cooler than it sounds. I'm taking my sweet time this afternoon uploading some photos, so those of you with facebook can check it out. I'll email the link home as well.

The Himalayas are really something. I'd love to give you more detail than that, but I can feel a teenager's arsenal of hyperboles creeping in. I guess I'll stick to the facts instead.

Gangotri is a small town in northern Uttaranchal which is regarded as the spiritual source of the Ganges. There's quite a temple there. It's about 12 hours from Rishikesh by bus. The physical source of the Ganges is the Gaumukh glacier, which is about 19km past Gangotri. Gangotri is surrounded on three sides by rather large snow-capped mountains from the Himalayan range, featuring Shivling Peak and Bhagirath I and III (all around 6500m). We did a 3-day trek to Gaumukh, resting at the end of days 1 and 2 in the hamlet of Bhojbasa, which is really just a guesthouse and an ashram in the bottom of a valley. We stayed in the ashram. You meet interesting people in those. The kind of interesting that you put in scare quotes.... 'interesting.'

The glacier itself is retreating, now, hundreds of metres per year. As you walk along the trail out to it from Bhojbasa, you pass rocks where people have marked "Gaumukh, 1935," "Gaumukh, 1966," and it's really shocking. When the town of Gangotri was founded (meaning within the last 3500 years), the glacier reached its edge. That means 19km of retreat in 3500 years. In geological time, 3500 years is a heartbeat. That's a mind-blowing amount of change. Additionally: if the markers are accurate, it seems that the vast majority of that retreat has happened in the last 150-200 years. Hrm, what happened 150-200 years ago?

Shameful, and painful. As we sat in the snout of the glacier, we could hear the ice cracking deep in its heart, ripping out through the crevices. Periodically, slides of ice and rock crashed down the side of the ice face. Really surreal.

Anyway. Some difficult travel later, we're back in Rishikesh, and having a recovery day before leaving for Dharamsala.

Up next: Dharamsala blogging!

Free Tibet indeed.

Hi, we're alive, and we're in Uttaranchal

Yes, that Uttaranchal.

There's a lot I skipped over before, about our time in Punjab. Like being shown how to behave properly in a gurudwara, for one. But again I'm short on time. I'll have it all down pat by the end of the trip and discuss it when I'm home.

We've just come from Dehra Dun, Uttaranchal, where we stayed with yet another generous member of S's family's community. Again it was lovely. Uttaranchal is quickly catching up to Rajasthan and Punjab as my favourite Indian states (sorry, Delhi). Of course, that's all the ones we've been to so far. But at some point between the tucked-between-mountains-on-three-sides Ayurvedic Medical school and the life-in-your-hands, lump-in-your-throat bus ride up the cliffs to the Mussoorie hill station (a small town at a great altitude where people come to escape the heat in the summer), it's becoming clearer and clearer that wherever I settle down will have to be in a valley. Or on a mountain. I haven't been around hills of this size since New Zealand.

We're in Rishikesh now, taking our first look at the Ganges - which somehow, for some reason, totally lives up to expectations. We might take it easy today, since we've had a busy few days leading up to now. Either today or tomorrow we'll go to watch evening puja on the river, take a walk around town, who knows. We'll be between here and Haridwar for the next two days, until we take an overnight train to Delhi on the 2nd-3rd to go pick up my passport (woot!). Then we're going poking into Uttar Pradesh. Figure while we're here we might as well go look at this.

Needless to say, I'm pretty excited for the next two weeks or so. Back to Delhi (which, oddly, I'm looking forward to - although most of the Indians we've spoken to about it refer to it as things like "awful," "nightmarish," and "hell"), then Agra (for the ghost city of Fatehpur Sikri as well as the Taj, which is getting and entire dawn-to-starlight day for itself), then Varanassi (of the famous ghats), then Khajuraho, then back across into southern Rajasthan for Udaipur and, hopefully, Pushkar.

In Patiala we were invited to a wedding on March 15 (I think I might have mistakenly told some people we were seeing one in February - we're not), so we'll be headed back up into Punjab for that in another two weeks. After the wedding we'll go down past Mumbai into Maharashtra, spend some time around Aurangabad (for the cave temples at Elora and Ajanta) and at the citadel in Daulatabad, and then down into Goa, Karnataka, and Kerala. The next few weeks are going to be just amazing.

Argh, internet time is up. I was going to link you photos to all of the above, but y'all know how to google image search. Go spend some time on wikipedia. We'll talk to you soon. Once again, wish you were here.