Rishikesh has been a place people travel to in order to become someone slightly different for over a thousand years, sadhus and seekers first, and later, in 1968, four musicians from Liverpool who wrote some of their most enduring songs on its riverbank. Something about this particular stretch of the Ganges seems to loosen whatever a person has been holding onto too tightly.

This five-day retreat is built around exactly that loosening. The days move slowly between yoga on the riverbank, a personalised Ayurvedic consultation, and an evening Ganga Aarti ceremony, where hundreds of floating lamps drift past you on water that has been sacred to millions of people for far longer than most countries have existed. For anyone who wants it, a foothill trek or a rafting session offers a gentler kind of adventure, though many guests find that simply sitting beside the river, with nowhere else to be, is more than enough on its own.