I had tried to book a room at the High Bank Peasant’s Cottage in Rishikesh before we left McLeod Ganj, but was told they were full. Thus, I decided to look online for a room, and found a very nice website advertising colorful rooms at cheap rates. I booked it. So, when we got to Rishikesh, our rickshaw driver dropped us on one side of the Ganges, and pointed vaguely to the other side. There, he said.

T and I crossed the suspension bridge, dodging cows and locals and tourists taking pictures and found the Lucky Hotel. Would that its name was true. We waited about ten minutes for a staffperson to even show up, and that was only after T went searching for him. The guy opened a river view room for us, and walked in first, smoothing over the covers of the bed and sweeping under it. Then he went into the bathroom where he hosed everything down, before telling us okay and opening the door for us. I stood there, frozen. When he had been smoothing the covers and sweeping, he had taken a bag and thrown it into the hallway. As I was standing in the hallway and I am a woman, I recognized it immediately. It was a bag of USED MAXI PADS. I was horrified and couldn’t bring myself to enter the room. It was obvious that the room had not been cleaned after the last tenants left (hence the smoothing and hosing down and sweeping) and who knows where those had been sitting? In my mind, they had been sitting on the pillow that still lay there, unwashed.

Then came the breakdown. When the man left, T went into the room and made his best attempt to pretend the room was fine. Look at the nice colors! We have a river view! I, on the other hand, sat down on the bed and sobbed. I had eaten about 13 potato chips in the past 24 hours, had about 48 minutes of sleep and now I was supposed to sleep in a dirty, used-maxi-pad-filled room with no sheets. Could life get any worse? I think not.

Confused my my meltdown and probably in fear for his life, T got me out of the room and back across the bridge for some breakfast. After some chai and chocolate cake (shut up, I was having a breakdown), I agreed to go look for another place to stay–we would go to the High Bank Peasant’s Cottage and ask whether they had a room. They did.

So we trekked back down the hill, across the bridge and back to the Unlucky Hotel. Were leaving, we told them. As with the woman in the Phoenix hotel where my sister, T and I found a crack pipe in the room, he did not bat an eye. T paid him marginally less than a day’s rate (why he did not argue is beyond me, but I suspect it may have had something to do with having a wife who was about 13 seconds away from being institutionalized) and we left. Goodbye forever, Unlucky Hotel, you den of filth and misery. Just so you know, when we went back two hours later to check out, the bag of gross was STILL SITTING IN THE HALLWAY. Ew. I feel dirty just writing about it.

So, Rishikesh. Rishikesh is a holy city on the Ganges, best known for being the place where the Beatles wrote the White Album and for being the ‘yoga capital of the world.’ It’s a city built on hills, the aqua Ganges river weaving in between, with two delicate suspension bridges crossing it. Despite the gangs of monkeys crawling all over the Unlucky Hotel bridge, pooing on people, Rishikesh is quite a pretty city, and after I got over my initial horror, I liked it.

It must be said, however, that Rishikesh is full of hippies. Not the trust-fund hippies that we found in McLeod Ganj–kids in North Face fleeces who came to India to find themselves. The hippies in Rishikesh had found themselves, and it was not in a shower. The city was full of dreadlocked people in what T calls MC Hammer pants, wearing bindis, often walking around looking dazed. In Rishikesh, I discovered that T has a particular loathing for dirty hippies (though mostly of the Trust Fund variety), and he would see them and hiss to me, WASH YOUR HAIR AND GET A JOB! In turn, I would choke on my laughter and try to explain to him that if he didn’t like hippies, he was in the wrong goddamn country.

Fortunately, the High Bank Peasants Cottage was not full of hippies, which pleased us both. I found the hotel online, on a website that prominently featured the fact that Kate Winslet had stayed there. There she sat, serene in a scarf, sitting on their porch. Now, if you know me at all, you know I have a deep love for Kate Winslet and, were she to come knocking, I would be Mrs Winslet instead of Mrs Hill. Also, I thought it was an excellent chance to stay in the same place as a celebrity for one of the few times in our lives (celebrities don’t generally frequent filthy Indian hotels that charge less than $10 a night).

The High Bank sat on a hill above the city, bathed in sunlight all day long. We had a room with an enormous porch that we shared with a Spanish girl, who spent much of her day sitting in the sun, talking on her cell phone. The High Bank also had a giant Great Dane named Dolly, who soon became my best friend; a small cat with whom I bonded until she ungratefully scratched (and potentially bit) me after I massaged her for an hour, leaving me convinced I would die of rabies; and a really cute little Indian girl who lived on the ground floor and wore an English newsboy-style cap all the time.

Unfortunately, the High Bank also had blankets that had been soaking up dust for the past century. T was immediately allergic to the room, and I soon became very coughy as well. Much of our time there was spent with T glaring at me through bleary, allergic eyes, rasping, KATE WINSLET MAKES ME SICK. Unfortunately, the sun and view and general loveliness of the hotel and my fear of moving back to a hellhole caused us to stay right where we were.

Recently, my father asked me, What do you DO all day? And instead of giving him the answer he expected, which of course was: wake up at 5, sacrifice an infant and drink its blood before going to Satan-worshipping school, then shave our heads and walk naked around town prior to tattooing ourselves with strange Hindu symbols, then smoke all kinds of opium and have a giant orgy, I told him the truth: we sleep, walk and eat. He seemed somewhat disappointed by my response.

Life was no different in Rishikesh. T would sleep late; I would get up slightly earlier and try to blog in the sunshine, and then we would walk into town. We would walk down the hill, past the leper colony and the hospital for the dying; down the stairs filled with sadhus (holy men who leave their families to travel to sacred sites and beg for money), where we would either give money to all of none of them; down to the German bakery by the terrifying monkey bridge, or down a different hill to Ram Jhula. Ram Jhula was on the other side of the river, past the Unlucky Hotel area, and was much more relaxed. It was there that we met a beautiful Indian guy who lives in an ashram in Rishikesh who photocopied some of our Lonely Planet book for his upcoming trip to Goa with a French girl he met at the ashram.

We would walk, eat, and then walk back, or take a rickshaw. One rickshaw journey was especially memorable: we ended up in a tuktuk full of locals, including one old man with very bad breath who kept speaking to me in Hindi despite the fact that I clearly didn’t understand him, before they would all explode into laughter at my confusion. I could have done without that ride.

Part of the reason we came to Rishikesh was to do yoga, since it is meant to be the yoga capital of the world. And so, I signed up to do a yoga class at the hotel (the other options were somewhat overwhelming). So T and I ended up doing a class with two English girls in a tiny, frigid room on the first floor of the main building. It was, bar none, the worst yoga class I have ever had and I have been doing yoga for 12 years. This wasn’t his fault, but the guy sounded just like Apu, which made it enormously difficult to take him seriously. Also, he had no idea what he was doing. He would make us do random poses, then stand with our heads leaning off to one side, and breathe for about a minute. Then, another totally unrelated pose. The class was so bad that the girls, who had come to Rishikesh on a yoga package, told the hotel they wanted their money back. It was our only yoga class in Rishikesh.

Because we weren’t doing yoga, it seemed only fair that I spend our yoga money on an auyrvedic massage, also offered at the hotel. Off I went, to a tiny room with a dirty mattress on the floor and a plump woman with sparkly eyes waiting to massage me. I lay on the dirty mattress for an hour as she vigorously rubbed me down with about five gallons of what smelled like vegetable oil, rolling me over so that I picked up all the dirt on the mattress and ended it up with it sticking to my body. Ayurvedic massage (or this one, anyway) apparently includes quite a lot of breast massage, to which I am not accustomed. But I lay there, with a strange woman rubbing my chest, covered in oil and grit, wishing I was back on the frigid floor with Apu yelling yoga poses at me.

As if that wasn’t enough fun, I also agreed to have some sirodhara, which I thought was included in the price. Sirodhara is the dripping of warm oil on your forehead. The guy who offered it to me told me it was very relaxing. I lay on the table, completely covered with more dirty towels by the masseuse (I assume because the sirodhara guy was a man and I am not and I was all nekkid underneath), as the man drizzled more vegetable oil back and forth across my hairline. It was a strange sensation: calming and at the same time very distracting as I thought, my skin is already breaking out from all this travel. What the hell is this going to do to me? At the end, I was completely soaked in oil from my head to my toes and I felt as if I had a close encounter with the Exxon Valdez: all for the bargain price of $15. It took three rounds of shampoo to get it all out, and I had to wash the clothes I wore to and from the massage twice because they were soaked through. I am every man’s dream, I tell you.