Those of us who have traveled in north Indian in January before were completely unprepared for the cold: the near freezing temperatures in Allahabad are the coldest in this region in years. We Westerners arrived with Arctic certified sleeping bags but quickly fortified ourselves with additional Indian Army issue wool blankets, and still many of us shivered through the night. On some mornings when the sun finally rises, army troops comb through the tents on the floodplain of Allahabad for the bodies of Indian poor who have frozen to death during the night.

The Himalayan Institute of Allahabad is donating blankets and clothing to help the pilgrims who arrive at this holy site less well equipped than we are. As we Westerners depart for home, many of us are leaving extra coats and sleeping bags to help the local people protect themselves from the cold.

For many Americans and Europeans today, pilgrimage means traveling via a jumbo jet, staying at a comfortable hotel, and taxi-ing to Lourdes or Medjugorje or to the next cathedral on our list. We forget that for most of history--and still today in countries like India--embarking on a pilgrimage was a long and dangerous undertaking calling forth all one’s personal resources to reach a goal and to return home again. Watching the sadhus--some of them nearly naked--streaming up the bank of the Ganges in the bitter cold of the mornings makes us truly appreciate how much the pilgrimage to the Maha Kumbha Mela means to them.

One positive aspect of the cold is that there are very few insects here. Mosquitoes--usually a nuisance and, since some of the carry maleria, also occasionally a danger--are almost completely absent. They simply can’t survive the cold.

As Dr. Rudolph Ballentine, the internationally known holistic physician, commented at his lecture here the other night, most of us Westerns may aspire to live in harmony with nature but few of us have ever really lived out in nature before, experiencing the raw elements for any length of time. Waking up in the cold darkness, stumbling out to the latrines where toilet paper cannot be used, and rinsing our hands in cold well water, we finally understand for the first time in our lives why so many ancient cultures worshipped the sun. That big ball of light, rising over the eastern horizon through the dusty haze, is the most welcome sight we can imagine.

Any Western pilgrims who need silence in order to fall asleep have had to get over that limitation here. From the Maha Kumbha Mela tent city two kilometers away music and prayers have been blaring over the PA systems almost all night. It’s easy to understand why: native pilgrims without Northern Face sleeping bags and Eddie Bauer winter jackets keep chanting and dancing throughout the night to honor God-and to keep from freezing to death.

The Himalayan Institute Maha Kumbha Mela campsite is set up with a careful eye to local ecology. There are no napkins at the dinner table-Indian don’t wipe their hands on paper towels, unnecessarily decimating trees and creating enormous amounts of paper waste. They rinse their hands with water after eating or rub their soiled hands together combining the oils of the foods they’ve just eaten, and then rub the oil onto their faces. This way nothing is wasted.

The food here is really organic-not “certified” organic. The oranges on the breakfast table really taste like oranges (they don’t taste like potatoes like the oranges from the supermarkets at home). In fact, if you pinch the orange’s rind a fragrant spray of orange essence is emitted. Try that with an orange from the Safeway. The bananas are a third the size of our bananas at home, and if you don’t eat them today or tomorrow, the day after they will rot. The fruit here hasn’t been genetically engineered or chemically altered to “improve” it in any way, and is still intensely sweet and flavorful.

But there’s a problem when we get up to clear the dinner table. There is one bucket for metal planets and water cups, and another for food waste, but where do we throw the empty plastic water bottles we brought with us from the city, or the packaging which held our anti-bacterial handwipes? Nature doesn’t accommodate nonorganic residue here. It insults the land--it has no place in the natural symmetry of birth, death and decay.

The air is often a bit hazy--the result of uncountable campfires at the mela site. We can smell the burning cow dung used for fuel even from here. Auto exhaust in only a small contributor to it. The city of Allahabad is gridlocked, having swollen to 100 times its normal size. Most pilgrims know better than to try to get anywhere by car.

Hatha yoga classes have been rescheduled from early morning to late afternoon--a happy change for many of us, since doing postures in the cold was not necessarily a welcome challenge. Yet enduring the bracing air, breathing and eating what nature here provides, has given us all a profound first-hand appreciation for what it truly means to live a natural life.