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Chamba
treated us to a good view of the mountains and we had a undeserved 1000m descent thrown in for free. The remains of the old road went past the sad ruins of old Tehri. For several km the road was a real mess, smashed up by the trucks taking stone from a quarry to the dam works. Once beyond the quarry we could enjoy the ride, as much as one can when ones drivetrain is caked in mud and screaming for mercy.

Ghansyali fortunately did have a hotel, and a shop selling toothbrushes. It was a surprisingly pleasant place. There was nothing exceptional about any of the buildings but the town was just the right size, and had a pleasant busy-ness; we strolled up and down, enjoying looking at the shops and dhabas. Clearly the time was ripe for something nasty to happen. The Indians are a trustworthy lot but there are exceptions, and we found in the morning that someone had wrenched the VDO from Colin’s bike. We were down to our last two altimeters and if there was anything that was essential to this trip, it was measuring and accounting for every single vertical centimetre we had sweated over. My Suunto had been showing low battery since the start, and you try finding a 2430 battery in the middle of Garhwal. Colin’s GPS took standard AAs, but ate them like biscuits. Nevertheless we did manage, with a little guesswork.

I really should say here that this incident was very uncharacteristic. Overwhelmingly our encounters with Indians were friendly, and a great pleasure. On a cycle tour you are always travelling through fields, villages and towns and always passing people, and you exchange greetings and smiles, and these encounters are so pure and free of anything more complicated than just the simple pleasure of human beings, from utterly different worlds, exchanging smiles; expressing the pleasure you have of travelling and being welcome in their beautiful country, and the pleasure they have that others have come halfway round the world to visit their home. To some of the little children, we seemed so astonishing and bewildering, that all they would do was gaze up in unblinking and round-eyed awe. Lots of people from the villages liked to stop and talk; we wished we had brought photographs of the UK to show them. And we were probably photographed by the Indian tourists as much as we photographed the locals.

Admittedly, young men generally thought we were a hilarious sight.

 

Chirbatia crossing

We crossed the Chirbatia Khal over to the Mandakini valley, and rode on up to Tilwara. This was one of our lowest altitudes, and the valley here was noticeably different from the higher altitudes. There are banana palms, and the women wear saris rather than the woollier garb of the hills. It is like an invasion of plains India into the mountains. The GMVN’s place at Tilwara was their best effort, its delightful wood-scented bungalows in well kept lawns and pretty flowers making a pleasant change from the usual prisons and desolate ruins.

The next stage of the haul up to Dham number 3 took us high up the Mandakini valley to the roadhead at Gaurikund. There is a stiff climb to Guptakashi, which is where Shiva hid from Pavarti, though of all the places he could have chosen, why he chose this drab bus-stop is unfathomable. One does not question the ways of the gods.

In the last few km

Gaurikund

the river is in a rocky gorge and predictably the road is a toughie. Gaurikund at first sight was not a pretty sight. Buses and trucks were crammed into a tight and muddy space in front of some very dingy concrete boxes. Worse still was the sight of the main ‘street’ – a flight of steps, a sight guaranteed to elicit the same response from a cycletourist as from a Dalek. It seems astonishing, then, that I can say we came to rate Gaurikund as one of the most atmospheric of places we’d stayed.

Gaurikund stretches the definition of town; the relationship between inside and outside, building and street was so bizarre that it took some time to work it all out. It is a fused mass of warped concrete boxes at skewed angles, like something imagined by the Cubists. There are no streets but the leftover gaps in between; shops are not buildings given shape, defined, by their outsides but are open spaces inset into the solid mass. What looks to be the internal corridor of a hotel are the external balconies of two hotels, barely inches apart; somewhere below hidden in the shadows is another street. We had tea in one of these caves – a tiny space, two tiny wooden benches and tables, a tiny old woman making the tea, the walls lined with newspapers in incomprehensible-to-us Devanagari, randomly places niches in the walls housing sacks of flour. The town was like a box of magic tricks: if you hit the right narrow stairwell, you find a load more treasures hidden below the main street: a temple complex, a sort of temple patio behind a finely wrought screen in a vine design, and a maze of restaurants, a hot springs pool full of pilgrims larking about.

The walk up to Kedarnath had surreal elements. It is a broad, well maintained concrete path, better than many mountain roads we have seen, (in eg certain richer countries in South America and if the head of the Chilean Highways Agency is reading this, this supposed to be a hint) lined with street lights and banners from the electricity provider (‘lighting every 4th bulb in India’ – one might wonder at the exact meaning of this, since somewhat less than one in four bulbs actually functions). As we walked up, from every dhaba or teastall we passed we caught a snatch of radio cricket commentary; India were playing Sri Lanka and we followed the progress of the match by fragments. The colourfully-dressed ponies add to the air of a seaside promenade, which belies the truth that it is a fair haul up to Kedarnath, pretty well climbing the full height of Ben Nevis. Most pilgrims take the pony; many of those who chose to walk were not prepared for how tough it was.

The pilgrims’ greeting is ‘Jai Kedar’ which sounds irresistably like ‘iechi da’; I expect we negated all the positive karma we had earned in doing the Char Dham by our irreverence, plus the fact I insisted on wearing a Cerveza Cusquena T-shirt.

Kedarnath

Kedarnath has a spectacular setting: to the north ringed by a wall of snow peaks, and to the south, looking out down the valley to an endless succession of ridges disappearing into haze. There is not much to the town – the temple complex, a short street with a few shops and dhabas, a scattering of ashrams and hotels. The temple itself is a handsome building – a tapering tower, the main block with intricate friezes and surprisingly classical proportions and portico. We stayed the night, enduring the cold, and visits from the hotel’s resident rat, to guarantee the crystal clear skies of the early morning.

On the return we passed through a dozen climatic zones in a day, from 3500m down to about 1000m – snow desert to pine forests, rocky moorland to jungly temperate rain forests to tropics. From the low point we were to climb back up to 4000m – though I admit, not quite all in the same day. We got part of it done that afternoon, reaching Ukhimath, where the GMVN have good huts in gardens on the hillside terraced into an idyllic spread of fields and orchards.

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