T A B L E_T A L K Roughing it after 40: Boomers and their parents discuss hitting the road in the Wanderlust area of Table Talk R E C E N T L Y Adventures of my youth By Louise Rafkin Can midlife travelers recapture the carefree wanderings of old? (06/15/98) Suddenly last summer By Hal LaCroix Babes, buzzwords and biz-bonding at the Nantucket Film Fest (06/12/98) Letter from Jakarta: After the sky falls By Jeff Pulice When expats flee, foreign guys become very attractive -- and other bits of wisdom (06/11/98) Are we the world? By Andrew O'Hehir Despite our uneasy place on Planet Soccer, the United States will be one of 32 nations vying for glory as the globe's most passionately watched sporting event begins (06/10/98) The Internet comes to the Outback By Simon Winchester A 7-year-old boy's life changes forever (06/09/98) Browse the Wanderlust Feature archives		BY ANNE CUSHMAN | Late last March, I sat on the banks of the Ganges in Rishikesh, India, wondering if I should be in Kathmandu instead. It's a delusion that occasionally seizes me on the road -- the nagging anxiety that I've made a wrong turn, that I'm not where I should be, that the life I'm supposed to be living is waiting for me somewhere else, packaged and ready to go, like a takeout dinner I've ordered from a restaurant whose address I now can't remember. For five months, I'd been traveling all over India researching a guidebook to ashrams and pilgrimage sites for spiritual tourists. Now it was almost time to head back to California, and the routine grind of my job as an editor at Yoga Journal. I wanted to finish my trip with a mystical adventure, and I had one in mind: a pilgrimage north up the sacred Ganges, worshipped by Hindus as a goddess incarnate, to its source at the ancient temple of Gangotri, high in the Himalayas. Fueling this vision was a phone call I'd gotten the week before I left for India from a close friend with lung cancer. "I had a dream that you were supposed to bring me some air from Gangotri," he had told me. "Just take a deep breath and hold it till you get back." But after three days in Rishikesh, the launching pad for the Gangotri pilgrimage made by tens of thousands of Hindus every summer, I was reluctantly facing the fact that my timing was off. I needed to be back in Delhi within two weeks, to catch my flight to California. But the road to Gangotri, I learned in Rishikesh, was buried by landslides and avalanches 37 miles short of the holy temple, which was still closed for the winter. And although a trekking agent I consulted assured me that I could hike there cross-country, "no problem," the expedition he described was an eight-day, subfreezing trek through unplowed snowdrifts -- hauling camping gear handed down from the Indian army, circa 1965 -- with only a hired guide for company. "No problem," the agent assured me again. "Our guide is very good chap, speaking some English, will be discussing with you philosophy of life and all like that." That clinched it. I resigned myself to remaining in the foothills. For any reasonable person, Rishikesh would be sufficiently magical. It's the "gateway to the gods," a holy pilgrimage spot, where the Ganges descends from the Himalayas to the plains. The river rushed at my feet, bottle-green over glinting white boulders. I gazed across the water at a pastel froth of spired and turreted temples and ashrams, peach and pink and yellow and baby blue -- I've never seen a city that so strongly resembles a 6-year-old's birthday cake. The streets were jammed with pilgrims: the wandering ascetics known as sadhus, whose painted faces and tridents marked their allegiance to Shiva, the god of destruction; a gang of blond yoga students in immaculate white kurtas, arguing heatedly in German. A rubber raft floated by, bearing a load of tipsy white-water rafters in life jackets and helmets, belting out the theme song from a popular Hindi film. But none of it charmed me -- I was too distracted by the foul weather inside my head. My own mind felt hard and lumpy, like a bed that I couldn't get comfortable in, no matter how hard I tried. Rishikesh seemed like a spiritual Disneyland, mysticism packaged for tourists. I yearned for the raw, wild spirit of the Himalayas, where solitary yogis spend decades in mountain caves, practicing ascetic rites to bring themselves to God. I was tired of doing things alone, but also tired of meeting new people -- after five months on the road, I was sick of being the new kid in town every single week. I wanted to find someone to go to Gangotri with me, but it's a tough way to initiate a conversation: "Would you like to go on a long and grueling hike through the snow with me? We really need to leave tomorrow, since I don't have much time ..." This is about as effective as announcing, five minutes into a first date, that you're only interested in a committed monogamous relationship and you want to have a baby within a year. Two days later, the travel gods came to my rescue. I met a traveling companion, a 37-year-old Spanish spiritual seeker named Maria. Maria didn't want to go all the way to Gangotri, but she was heading halfway there -- up the river to an ashram near Uttarkashi, where she'd heard an enlightened guru was in residence. I rented a sleeping bag from the trekking agent -- its approximate weight was 235 pounds, but I was sure the lead lining would prove very useful in the event of nuclear attack. I strapped it to my backpack, determined that if I couldn't make it to Gangotri, at least I'd get as close as I could. N E X T+P A G E | A rash act