Waking up (6.00 am):
When I was small, one of the biggest luxuries in life was sleeping in on a holiday, and getting up around 8.00 am, when mother pushed me out of bed. A time has come now, I get up at 6.00 am, whether there is an alarm set or not. I don’t know whether to be proud of my mind’s discipline or to be resigned to an aging mind that cannot sleep. Either way, it was not much use today. Although there had been some growlings (thunder, not tummy) last night, the rain Gods finally decided to rain all around, like in Almora, Ranikhet, Mukteswar, Binsar, and held off on Kausani. Why? Pure cussedness, that’s why. So we were not greeted by a clear sky in the morning, and no Himalayan peaks.
A few more Bengali families had checked in, in the rooms beside us and above us.We swapped travel tales of our respective trips and our self-drive trip drew the expected surprise and admiration. Incidentally, we have just completed 20 days on our current trip and have 20 more days to go. Just about half done.
I realised that after a while, we start living for the day. Or with a timeframe of just 2-3 days. Once we accept this as a way of life, we are not bogged down any more by the large number of days still to be completed, or the hundreds of miles yet to be driven, or the innumerable packings and unpackings still to be carried out. We ensure proteins every day, veggies every day (if possible), and go easy on spices and oil, and once in a while, do a muri or cheera dinner to give a little space to our digestion. Underclothes get washed every night, and other clothes maybe once a week if required, or else, if sufficient numbers are being carried, never. In a trip like this one, where we are expected to travel through hot as well as cold weather, number of clothes increase, as we have to provide for both types of climes.
Now that’s a quick look inside our travelling lives. Will share some more insights as we go along.
We got ready leisurely, and attacked the buffet breakfast of upma and paratha with alu sabji, together with fried eggs. Today, we were slated to do a southward foray to a waterfall, around half-an-hour away, so we were leaving a bit late, so that we could have lunch outside as well.
Visiting Rudradhari waterfall (11.00 am):
This waterfall is named after a temple located just beside it. We are always keen to visit waterfalls, so had marked this down on Google maps as a drivable place. Gmaps had also subtly hinted that there was a 1.5 km trek involved. Doable, right?
A word about our philosophy toward treks. We believe that the world is broadly divided into two hemispheres, those who trek and those who don’t, and we were firmly in the southern hemisphere (you can guess which that is). Panna would usually handle queries on trekking by saying: “We trek there only if our car can go there”. But our recent walks in temples and tea gardens had suddenly convinced us that we could handle a 1.5 km trek. How hard could it be? In our mind’s eye, we saw ourselves strolling through a pine forest, stopping for selfies, sipping water by the wayside, watching butterflies, tickling a lily or two, and generally having a whale of a time. A piece of cake, with walnuts.
As we approached the designated point, a small eating-joint owner flagged us down and handed us two stout poles. “You will need them,” he said. “Free and returnable”. Now this was a new way to market food, we thought, but hung on to them nonetheless. We crossed a small bridge, turned a corner, and parked behind another couple of cars. A few guides offered their services. Guides? What the hell for? Tickling lilies? “Sir, you might get lost in the jungle. And the way is rough. God forbid, what if you twist an ankle and get stuck. One hour trek sir, one way.” That twisted ankle bit appealed to my twisted mind. And one hour for 1.5 kms? Why, why?
We found out why. As our guide, a young lad of 34 named Deepak, pranced down the path, we found that the pathway suddenly disappeared into boulders and rough cuts that plunged downhill at a rough angle of 60 deg! I was thankful for my pole, which I used to profit as a third leg, especially while descending. Panna, however, surrendered hers to Deepak, finding it difficult to juggle phone, selfie stick and a jolly pole at the same time. The pole had to go, of course. Soon we had reached the river bed strewn with boulders and were walking beside them, beaming benignly. An odd butterfly had started to attract our attention, when “Yoohoo!”, our guide was right inside the boulders, stepping from crag to crag in his slippers. He, however, admonished us to take our time, but with a body language (squatting like a dispeptic monkey on a rock far ahead, head hanging, moodily swinging Panna’s pole) that emanated a message through the ether that don’t be all day about it.
And the ether was ethereal. We were taking rest whenever we wanted to, notwithstanding the pressure of keeping up with a young pahari with the hooves of a mountain goat. The silent pine forest was all around. The crashing path of white river boulders that cut through the greenery was superbly dramatic. I believe post-monsoon, the water rushing down would be substantial, and places that we were crossing lightly in our sneakers would need to be waded through carefully. At points, the path beside the river climbed up, thinned down and hugged the cliff, just a foot wide, while at others, it travelled through little flat lands, where the earth was baked hard and solid, the pine needles slippery beneath our feet.
As I said earlier, we do not do trekking. If we knew the sort of terrain that we would have to walk through (scramble through, more like), we may have scratched it from our list and chilled on some park bench in an ashram. But we were really glad we did this. Firstly because we developed a new found confidence in what our body could handle. Seriously, by the time we finished climbing to the waterfall and temple - and it had been an upward movement all through, with a last climb of around a hundred steep steps - we had exercised umpteen muscles in our body. Thighs, calves, toe-gripping, ankle-holding (we were wearing sneakers, not trekking boots), pole-clenching, and grimacing, to name a few. But since we did it at our pace, our body cooperated. Secondly, we found that there is no better way of absorbing nature than walking through it. This may be old hat to old trekkers, but for us, it was a new exhilaration.
The last 100 steps were in fact quite hard for us, and we were cursing Deepak for not giving us an inkling. We reached the top, huffing and puffing, with a few men and ladies watching us indulgently. They had come to the temple to perform janau (sacred thread ceremony) for a kid, and a bunch of children where bounding around the surrounding hillside like clockwork toys gone cuckoo. We went down the last few steps to the temple where Rudradhari (Shiva) is supposed to reside. The temple actually nestles in a cave.
