Delhi to Rishikesh

Until April 2026 this was a grind up NH-58 through Meerut and Muzaffarnagar, and the reason a lot of people flew to Dehradun instead. The Delhi–Dehradun Expressway changed the arithmetic. You run 108 km on the new road, take the 50.7 km spur that branches near Halgoya and bypasses Roorkee, come out on Haridwar's ring road at Bahadarabad, and finish on about 25 km of ordinary road. Call it a little under 200 km from east Delhi. Published figures of 230 or 240 km describe the old way round, and the spur was projected to bring Delhi–Haridwar down from roughly five hours to under two. Which makes it a weekend, and makes the day trip look feasible in a way it is not. Rishikesh is a walking town split by a river with no car crossing in the middle of it. Arrive at noon, leave at five, and you will have seen one bank. The other thing to settle before you set off is that the bridge in all the photographs is shut. Lakshman Jhula has been closed for years — an IIT Roorkee assessment found its cables worn out — and its replacement, Bajrang Setu, now stands on the same line with a glass walkway down each side.

Rishikesh sits at about 340 m where the Ganga comes down out of the hills, and it is the starting point for the road to Yamunotri, Gangotri, Kedarnath and Badrinath. Almost everything else about the town follows from that. The bridges came with the pilgrim traffic. A 284-foot span across the gorge was washed out by the floods of October 1924; its replacement was built between 1927 and 1929 and opened to traffic in April 1930, and that bridge — Lakshman Jhula — became the picture of the place. Ram Jhula, downstream, is much newer, put up in 1986. Swami Sivananda founded the Divine Life Society here in 1936, and the ashrams that followed turned a pilgrim halt into a teaching centre that drew students from abroad. Then February 1968. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi had built an ashram at Chaurasi Kutia five years earlier, paid for with a $100,000 gift from the American heiress Doris Duke. The first of the Beatles landed in Delhi on 16 February; the last of them left the ashram on 12 April, and much of what became the White Album was written in between. Western visitors have been arriving ever since, and the yoga schools along the river are the direct descendants of that. The ashram's own lease had run out by 1981, the government took the land back in the mid-1990s, and it now sits inside Rajaji Tiger Reserve. Whitewater rafting arrived later and became the town's second industry, which is why the two banks feel so unalike.

The Ganga arriving out of the hills at Har Ki Pauri; the aarti at the Swarg Ashram ghats; the stone meditation huts of Chaurasi Kutia standing empty inside Rajaji; and Bajrang Setu, the glass-floored bridge that has taken over from Lakshman Jhula.

The Delhi–Dehradun Expressway opened on 14 April 2026 — 210 km from Akshardham to Dehradun, access-controlled, running past Baghpat, Baraut, Shamli and Saharanpur. Traffic for Rishikesh does not stay on it to the end. At the 108 km milestone, near Halgoya in Saharanpur district, a 50.7 km six-lane spur branches off, bypasses Roorkee to the north and comes out at Bahadarabad on Haridwar's ring road. From there it is ordinary road, roughly 25 km of it, and that last stretch is what decides your arrival time rather than anything on the expressway.

Go on a weekday. Watch for the Haridwar spur at the 108 km mark — overshoot it and you are committed towards Saharanpur and Dehradun, with a long way back. Then decide your bank before you park, not after. The footbridges carry nobody in a vehicle, so a car left on the wrong side of the Ganga means a detour by road every time you want to reach your bed.

Pick your bank before you book. Swarg Ashram, on the east side, is the ashram half of town, reached on foot over Ram Jhula or — outside the monsoon — by the ferries that cross near it. Tapovan is on the west bank at the far end of the old Lakshman Jhula line, and that is where the cafés and the rafting desks sit. They are not next door to each other: it is about 2 km along the riverside path from Swarg Ashram to the crossing, half an hour at walking pace, and then the bridge. Since Lakshman Jhula shut, that bridge is Bajrang Setu. Stay the night for the mornings. Swarg Ashram backs straight on to forest, and the hills immediately behind the ashrams still have caves with sadhus living in them. Chaurasi Kutia — the Beatles Ashram — is a walk south along the same bank, inside the Rajaji boundary. Do it early: it is a ruin in a tiger reserve rather than a museum, and shoes matter more than a camera. Two stretches of the year to avoid. From late April the Char Dham season starts and both Haridwar and Rishikesh fill with traffic heading up; the 2026 yatra opened on 19 April. July to September the monsoon puts the river up and takes hill roads out on landslides. October to March is the stretch that works, and February mornings are cold enough to want a jacket you did not pack.