A friend's wish and my desire to travel got our group of five headed for a journey that turned out just as expected - awesome. My first foray into the Himalayas left me thinking if Kerala was "Gods own country"; there had to be a better God. Such stupendous beauty always got you thinking of its creation - and in all, the insignificance of man.
It was sometime in February 09 that Disney mentioned to me his wish to visit the 'Valley of Flowers'. Our first line of thinking was we would hitch along with an annual trip the YMCA Bangalore organized. Over the months we started planning a trip to Orissa, Bihar & Jharkhand when I came across some information online about May - August being the best time to visit the Valley of Flowers. That learnt, we decided we'd do this - with other friends or just by ourselves.
Inspite of being guys who never plan trips, we took pains to read a lot on the valley and do a thorough route plan, etc. etc. for this trip. Unfortunately, the only slot available was the week before Independence which we knew was a little too late in the season.
Asking around, we (Disney & Yours truly) found another 3 mates (Yuvaraj, Jayan & Subramoni) who were up for this trip. The 7th of August found us flying out from Bangalore to Delhi with the hope of finding some way to get to Rishikesh that very night. Subbu got himself to Delhi earlier in the day and was to try finding a way to get to Rishikesh from there. Our charter was to get from the airport to ISBT, Kashmere Gate as soon as possible. Given the time crunch, we ensured we did not have any check-in baggage and made it out of the airport asap. Outside, we found the EasyCabs counter, who didn't have a cab available for the next 15 mins. On seeing the regular Prepaid taxi counter empty, it did not take us a moment to decide that we didn't need the fancy air conditioned EasyCabs and that the regular Yellow Line cabs would do us just fine. We rushed to pick up a token from the counter only to then see that we had to next wait in this incredibly long queue for the cab. Having jumped, we decided to stick to the line - which moved quite quickly. An excellent driver got us to ISBT in the shortest possible time (or that's what we were led to believe and I take that on face value), but he did good I think anyhow.
ISBT Kashmere gate at 2300 hrs. was a shocker after our good old Majestic and Kempagowda Bus stations of Bangalore. And the buses looked the part too. After asking a number of vendors (given the information desk had become the bedroom for the evening) we found a dirty bus headed to Haridwar and jumped in to get ourselves some seats we believed would be comfortable. And the journey began eventually - some water, no dinner, no leg room - all for the experience - it was not too bad. After leaving Delhi, we hit NH - 58 which was OK for a highway. Passing Meerut & Roorkee, we reached Haridwar at around 5:30 am.
You wonder why bus stations have to be the way they are - and which among the two horrible comfort stations are the better. Its something like Hope getting knocked out of an entire nation that it becomes your expectation to see the likes of such public facilities. I'll leave my description of the place at that. After our morning chores, we set of to get some grub and head to Joshimath. Given the treacherous route, you get only day buses for this 12 hr. journey. Breakfast, and then we find our seats on another of those despicable buses - a smaller one this time around for the curvaceous route we have ahead of us.
We get across Rishikesh (22 km) and just begin with the forests when we hear the road is blocked thanks to multiple landslides - and like these situations always are, you have multiple bits of information and just don't know which of these you can base your judgement on - do we wait to go forward, to we return and quit, do we go another route - and everyone including yours truly has an opinion. We wait by the road for a good hour and then hear that traffic is beginning to move when a lovely lorry driver comes by with a load of empty liquor bottles and nudges our bus like you would do a kid. By oh by, that sets the storyline for the next hour of my life. We have a furious bus driver and an all but lost lorry driver, trying to find middle line for an accident which was the equivalent of a stone loosing some moss - the bus was in such a horrendous state anyway that another dent and some loss of paint just couldn't have mattered. Luckly for the lorry driver (and for us), the owners of the truck were not too far and they got called in and settled the account for Rs. 1000/-.
While that almost got settled, we got shifted into another bus, whose driver could have tried out on some rally circuit. It was decided that we will move forward - which we did, only to get stuck in another jam at Shivapuri - not too far ahead. After waiting there for more than an hour, our gracious conductor decided to take a different longer route - at an additional cost of Rs. 50/- per head - one that would God Willing not be blocked out. And it wasn't. Good roads, o'er moors and mountains, saw us covering good distance to God alone knew where. Crossing Narendra Nagar, Champa and the expansive Tehri Dam, we reached Srinagar (which was on our original route) and from there to Rudraprayag where we halted for the night.
Having paid the fare to Joshimath, we had our doubts we would see the driver or our change the next morning, but went to bed in good faith and on Disney's assurance on his faith in humanity.
With that, a good bottle of rum, a non-vegetarian feast in a "Veg. Only" Hotel Krishna; we crashed. That was Day 1.
