Monday, Dec 27, 1999
Gangotri-Gaumukh-Tapovan Trek Part-1/5
Rasik Shah
Rasik Shah was born in the Indian diaspora in colonial apartheid type society of Kenya in the early forties. Having grown up in a multi-ligual, multi-racial society, he studied law in the London of the early sixties and went back to Kenya, practising as a criminal lawyer. He migrated with his young family to Canada in 1974 and practised law in Vancouver till 1995. He has been conducting trekking tours to the Garwhal region of India in the last few years and is now retired from law, writing full time. He has published a couple of short stories at the following sites:
1. "The Ngong Hills" at www.dorsai.org/~tjhubsc/ngong.htm
2. "At the Dentist's" at www.es.co.nz/~treeves/rasik.htm
He has written a novel set in Kenya and is trying to get it published.
The Gangotri trek is one of his favourite treks and he plans to lead a group to Gaumukh again in September, 2000. Please address any queries to him at: rshah132@home.com
|
 |
Gangotri Trek
As the dew is dried up by the morning sun
So are the sins of men dried
Up by the sight of the Himalaya,
Where Shiva lived and where the Ganga
Falls from the foot of Vishnu
Like the slender thread of lotus flower.
There are no mountains like the Himalaya,
For in them are Kailas and Manasarovar.
-From the Skanda Purana
Any trekking trip to the Indian Himalayas needs a lot of advance planning. The first requirement is the choice of the season during which to trek. The Garhwal region, where I usually go trekking, is subject to the monsoon in July and August and too cold before April or after October. The best views are to be had From mid-September to the end of October. For wild flowers and the flora of spring, the best time is mid-April to May, particularly for treks like the Valley of Flowers, when you can experience the glory of a rhododendron forest in full bloom against a backdrop of snow-covered peaks.
 Having decided on the Gangotri-Tapovan trek, the timing required was that the trekking party should be in Mussoorie, our usual trekking base, by mid-September. We would acclimatize a little by spending three or four days in this charming hill station at 6,300 feet, taking walks in the hills and valleys around the town. Mussoorie has grown on me in the course of several visits in recent years. I have gotten to know some of its interesting residents, like the writer Ruskin Bond, and professor, hiker, and photographer Ganesh Saili. I also was usually able to have the darshan of Swami Jnanananda at his cute kutti at Barlowganj, just outside Mussoorie, in a secluded part of the woods. One favourite haunt of ours was the bar at the main lobby of The Savoy Hotel, up a steep hill just west of the Library end of the town, where we spent many a pleasant evening hour over a beer in the stimulating company of Ruskin and Ganesh, the conversations as sizzling as the garam spicey-fried peanuts the Hotel cook served to go with the beer.
Several practical details always need to be taken care of before proceeding to the Indian Himalayas. Shopping for the best available airfares meant inquiring with the several 'bucket' travel agencies on Main Street, Vancouver. It is not unusual these days to find mainstream airlines like Air Canada offering special fares on the very busy Vancouver/Delhi route. Having gotten ourselves bargain return fares at around $1,400 (Canadian), we had to attend to obtaining visas from the Indian Consulate. A visit to their security-conscious offices in downtown Vancouver is always educational. To this day, I cannot figure out why the visiting period permitted by the particular visa applied for begins running on the date of issue of the visa, not the date of entry into India. If, for example, you apply for and get a visa for, say, a forty-five day stay in India, the forty-five days begin to run as of the date of issue of the visa. If you applied too early, then you may run out a couple of weeks of your permitted stay in India. It is a tight balancing act, to beat the system, as it were, because the visa fees, relatively high in the first place, vary according to the length of your planned stay in India. I always had a tussle working out whether to apply for a two month, or three month or six month visa and when to submit the application. The forty-five day period worked out well, provided I still had, say, over forty days left of the visa period when I landed in Delhi. This meant relying on nothing going wrong when I applied for the visa, close to the date of my departure, which was never a flexible date on the kind of airfares I chose to pay. The prospect of applying for a visa extension from within India is so unappealing as to be considered beyond the bounds of sanity.
 The other practical matter one has to plan well is what prophylactics and shots to take before embarking on the trip. Having grown up in tropical Africa I was not paranoid about potential stomach problems, the fear of the Delhi belly or Montezuma's revenge. But, also having experienced malaria once, I was doubly careful about taking all the right precautions. Again, common sense and the arrival of a new, more effective drug on the market made things easier. You had to take the new tablet only once a week, not swallow a couple of horrible pills that left a bitter aftertaste, provided you had good tolerance of the new drug. I was lucky in this regard.
All those preliminary steps can put one out of hundreds of dollars, and, in the end, I refrained from buying a traveler's mosquito net or a fancy sleeping bag from the all-new mile long outdoors equipment store that had opened in recent years in Vancouver. We would be able to borrow or rent sleeping bags from our well-equipped trek leader in Mussourie, I knew. On this point, more later. My advice to anyone going to altitudes above 12,000 feet is never to omit taking a very good sleeping bag.
Anyway, now on to the adventure itself.
We arrive in Delhi and get whipped around by the vigourous monsoon, in its primal ferocity. As usual, the taxi driver tries to dissuade us from going to the YWCA Family Hostel where we have reservations, then ends up going to the wrong Y, then tries to persuade us once again to go to an altogether nice new place he knows and finally, reluctantly, takes us along Ashoka Road, from where I navigate him to go the Gol Dak Khana roundabout and return back on Ashoka road, this time on the right side of the road, that is, the left side from where we could enter the compound of Blue Triangle YWCA Family Hostel Building next to the Banglasahib Gurdwara, as I had been directing him. He drives right by the little raised platform on which the Vintours office is located. I check inside but am disappointed to see that neither Vini nor Kabi is in the office. There is a young assistant present in addition to Annie, who recognizes me and flashes out her big white teeth smile. Annie is a dark southern beauty, girlish and naughty, I remember from the last time when the staid Diwali office celebration had ended with Annie and other members of the staff throwing off small lighted firecrackers at one another, outside the office in the grounds of the Y. Our plan is to stay two days in New Delhi and then head for Mussoorie, just fifty kilometers north of the railhead at Dehradun. I am becoming an old hand at this, coming to trek in the region for the fourth time in as many years, and have learnt to avoid road travel in India whenever possible.
My companion collapses into the easy chair of our room on the second floor of the Y building. On the way up, I was glad to see the many posters of paintings of rural life in India, tastefully done and arranged along the corridors. There is no air-conditioning, but the reassuring whirl of the ceiling fan creates consoling waves in the monsoon-moist heat of the room. The sound of rain beating at the windows adds to the feeling of coziness; It is about eleven in the night, we are not hungry, having been given one meal too many on our flight from Singapore where we stayed overnight, courtesy of the airline, on our way from Vancouver.
 We are too excited to go to sleep right away and know that we need to relax for a while with a drink and talk about what we intend to do in Delhi over the next two unstructured days. I pull the cognac mickey out of the daypack I have been carrying and soon realize that Melinda will need ginger ale to drown the potent potion down. I go to the side table, pick up the two clean-looking inverted glasses and set them up at the desk we are sitting around, pour out small portions of the golden elixir into the two glasses, dig out the packet of crispy tidbits that I saved from the airline's bar service and then push the buzzer for an attendant. I settle down on the other easy chair and say:
"Cheers, it will be a while before we get the ginger ale. I have some mineral water here, if that would help."
I had picked up the mineral water bottle at the dining room counter after we had checked in, mercifully having postponed the filling of endless forms at the reception to the next morning. I pull out the map of Delhi that I picked from Annie a few minutes ago and we settle down to planning tomorrow's walk down to Connaught Circus. The plan is to get to the Bookworm, my favourite bookshop on Block D, I think. We would then have a snack at the Zen Café, kitty corner from the bookshop, and head back in the afternoon to the hostel. We would pass through the Imperial Hotel lobby on Sansad Marg on the way back, possibly stopping for further refreshment at the snack restaurant on the garden verandah, facing the extensive lawns lined with swaying palm trees. The need to recreate pleasant moments from earlier visits was always strong in India, fueled by the need to find retreats from the relentless assault on the senses, the insistent ways of people wanting to sell things, provide services.
This country that I love every time I am away from it, that I hate when I am caught in the midst of its chaotic ways!
There is a knock on the door. I let the attendant in and order a couple of bottles of ginger ale, some ice and a plate of vegetable pakoras. He has turned up with surprising alacrity and I tell him to match the delivery time to his early response record so far. It will be another forty-five minutes and two calls to the dining room before we see him again. On this, our fifth or sixth visit to the country, we are reconciled to the pace of things and we chat away, sipping our drink and munching the airline's savoury biscuit-chips, loving the prospect of rising late, breakfasting at the dining room on their porridge and scrambled eggs, thin white, toasted, foam bread with the bright red jelly-jam, and, if we are lucky, some puris and South Indian rava uppuma.
We will take an overnight train to DehraDun, then go by taxi to Mussourie. The plan with my current group is to take a jeep safari to Ladakh. It is early July yet. We will spend about twelve days traversing across the north-eastern corner of Himachal Pradesh through Lahaul and Spiti and, after that detour, join the main Manali/Leh road going up straight north to Leh, staying in dhabas along the way or camping. We know that the monsoons can disrupt our tour and there could be landslides blocking the road at many different points. But there is no way of getting across to Ladakh overland outside the summer months of July and August, because the high passes like Taglang La (at 17,500 feet) will be closed in the winter months. After the Ladakh trip my plan is to fly back to Delhi and join up with another group that will arrive in Mussoorie in mid-September for a trek to the source of the Ganges
"Rasik Shah is leading a trek to the source of the Ganges and Tapovan this year in September. The two week journey will start from Delhi on 15th September, 2000. There will be other journeys such as an overland jeep safari of Ladakh in the summer of 2001. See future issues of Sawf Magazine for Rasik Shah's articles on Ladakh and other treks and tours.
For further details or inquiries please e-mail him at:
rshah132@home.com "
Credits
- Editing : Reeta Sinha
- Photographs : Judi Hopkins
|
