Valley of Flowers: A Travelogue Part IV

 I

The Flowers are Calling

“Dilli aur kitna duur?” I enquired of Dinesh. He was standing a few feet ahead of me, one leg propped on a black rock, chewing a stalk of grass. At my question, he pointed up. “Abhi hai Madam. Upar jana hai.” No little white lies this time, only hard cold facts, all uphill.

Throughout those nearly eight hours, I was to enquire of him the distance to the Capital an infinite number of times and each time he would smile that special smile of his as he answered me, tailoring them to the prevailing situation, sometimes assuring, sometimes blunt with the bare tritb and sometimes with his trademark sweet, little white lies.

My insides groaned.

I followed his fingers to where they were pointing. Up, right above my head I could see the path zooming forward with people trying to keep up. But that was not all. Much above that path immediately over my head, I spied bits of pink, orange, red and blue as they peeked from between the intervening trees. More trekkers in brightly coloured windcheaters and raincoats, but what chilled me was they were much, much above me, maybe hundreds of feet, appearing like little specks of fluorescent light at that immense height.

“Wahan? Baap re!!!”

I looked back at Dinesh for succour. I got none. There was for me only his smile of affirmation.

Hell! Hell! Hell!

But of course, there was no turning back for the flowers were calling and I had a rendezvous to keep. I took a swig of water, gritted my teeth, pulled the backpack tighter and continued the painful plod uphill.

As I climbed, my heart beating like a mad bull and my breath blowing like a steam engine, something flashed across my mind, something from a long, long time back, read as a child: a saying from a Russian folk tale.

“How do you make a long road short?”

I knew the answer to that.

“By song!”

But of course. 

I fumbled in my pocket and retrieved my earphones. Thankfully, some songs downloaded in the past were still available on YouTube, even without an internet connection. I turned the volume on full blast. Runa Laila’s soulful voice flowed in warm swathes over me “Ranjish hi sahi, dil hi dukhane ke liye aa ……”

And so I continued the relentless ascent, slowly and arduously; the long road kind of shortened by the heartbreakingly beautiful ‘Ranjish Hi Sahi’, Tagore’s soulful ‘Mone Robe Kina Robe Aamare’, and the lively ‘Mere Rashke Qamar’ played in turn, again and again and again (for I had only these three stored in my phone) till the cell battery succumbed, to exhaustion or heartbreak or perhaps to just boredom.

II

That Demented Track

Waking up at the crack of dawn, packing and repacking backpacks, checking raingear and water supplies, slathering on sunscreens and day creams and what nots all happened in a whirl of suppressed excitement that morning. Dinesh was there dot at six to pick us up. We moved with him from our guest house to Ghanghria proper, a distance of one km. It was a gentle climb but as I climbed, I realised that even walking 10 feet was making me breathless. I knew it was the altitude and the early morning nip in the air did not help.

Dinesh asked, “Madam, gloves chahiye?”

Knowing that the moment we walked a bit more we’d start feeling warm, I refused. But I was a little apprehensive about the altitude and made a mention of it to the other three, but they paid me scant attention. ‘Ignorance is really bliss,’ I snickered in my mind, testy at being ignored. Though sore, I didn’t pursue the matter for I had full faith in my trusted little Diamox ki goli which I had stuffed up the girls’ throats last evening and today morning.

We slowly walked up a track that snaked between colossal deodar trees, to the tiny hamlet of Ghanghria. Ghanghria is a nightmare of mules, their brusque owners, ramshackle shops and hundreds of trekkers and pilgrims all jostling one another in a giant cauldron of steaming mule droppings. It was horrible, but it was where we were to have breakfast. The stench notwithstanding, some hot tea, bread-butter and poha soothed us to some extent, and immediately after Dinesh gathered us all up and quickly herded out of that stifling cauldron, out into the open. Here the track crossed the handsome Lakshman-Ganga over a strong iron bridge and then bifurcated, the one on the right shooting straight up to Hemkund Sahib and the one on the left meandering around lost for a few hundred metres till it arrived at the Forest Check post which was also the entry to the Valley of Flowers.

          One was supposed to buy tickets at the entry point and enter names into the guard’s register. As Dinesh helpfully took care of all these tiresome formalities, we spent the time looking around. There were two large posters of flowers strung across the walls of the guard post and I snapped a picture of them, thinking they would help me identify the flowers I hoped to see in the Valley.

From here the path spread gently upslope. It was not raining but the sky was over-cast and I could see clumps of clouds sitting atop the dark hills that ringed the valley. The trail was narrow but had railings at certain portions and I found the slope very congenial. The flowers had already begun to show themselves, lining the path and my happiness was complete. I began snapping picture after picture and soon the girls had left me straggling, far behind. But I was not in the least bothered because Dinesh was there right behind me, bringing up the rear. He pointed out flowers to me, just like he had done on the road from Pulna to Ghanghria:

“You remember the Anemone we saw? See Madam, this one’s a Sunnymone!”

“That bright maroon flower? It’s a Potentila.”

“These are dog flowers, these pink ones.”

I was clicking as fast as possible.

But the trail was crowded, people jostled against one another and often I was pushed as I tried to take pictures. I found myself wishing it was a little less crowded. At one point, we came across a huge human traffic jam. Impatiently I peeked ahead but could not quite make out what had caused the roadblock. Alas, little did I know that the start to all my woes was just two feet away. Slowly, as the jam cleared, and I moved up, I saw with a shock what lay ahead and was responsible for the sudden slowing of the trekker-train. The trail now sloped, sharply downwards at nearly ninety degrees and instead of the expected smooth flat paving, it was composed of stones of all shapes and sizes that had been placed at weird angles, their sharp uneven edges pointing skywards.

I turned askance at Dinesh, “Where do I put my foot?”    

                      

In answer, Dinesh flitted across those jagged stones as if he was a ballerina on Kajaria tiles, leaving me feeling like a fool. But of course, that was just him giving me a demo of how to negotiate those stones for he immediately climbed back and put out a hand helpfully. But, as I later remarked to CC, my ego is bigger than my as# and of course I wouldn’t take his hand unless as the last resort. So after careful estimation of the angles of the paving stones, their coefficient of friction, their surface area to the tenth decimal point and other such applicable trigonometry and geometry and laws of physics, I gingerly placed one foot on a stone surface. I expected to immediately slip, lose my footing and plunge headlong into the Lakshaman-Ganga, but surprisingly, my foot held. Kind of relieved and again after another set of detailed calculations, I placed my second foot on another stone. Dinesh, I think must have taken a short nap in the interval between these two footsteps of mine. This entire routine of calculation and estimation and foot placement, all undertaken in Bollywood slow motion was to continue throughout the entire trek and only someone with Dinesh’s infinite patience could have borne my scaredy-catness with such good-humoured patience. 

The entire track in the Valley of Flowers, right from this point on, was made exactly in this same manner. It was if the mason/road builder had sculpted an unintelligible abstract stones sculpture, instead of a track. It was crazy how the stones were laid, all higgledy-piggledy: some with tips like the point of a spear, some at obtuse angles, some at right angles, some at acute angles and some with such treacherous gaps between them that I was certain to suffer a tri-malleolar fracture if my ankle got caught within their confines. And all this madness was at a sharp, nearly ninety-degree gradient. Because the route to the Valley was uphill, this crazy track was still do-able as I had no problems clambering up. But all the while as I negotiated that demented track, I shuddered to think what I would be facing on the way down. I have since that day taken a decided umbrage to stones irrespective of shape, size and composition and am also eagerly waiting the day I am able to get my hands on the chap who laid that track. I have for him the choicest tortures described in Hell, boiling oil and red-hot spears being only some of them.

I'll end this edition with a note of gratitude. Throughout this extremely uncomfortable and not-so-easy hike, three things stood by me steadfast: my hiking stick, my Quechua high ankle boots and of course my three songs (the ones I have mentioned previously). I grew to depend so much upon that little stick that later, walking on flat land without it, I found myself feeling empty, as if something vital was missing from my outfit. And as for my boots, they were without question, worth every naya paisa of that whopping five grand that I had paid for them. One thing that I am petrified of is slipping and these boots never let me down in this regard even once through those eight long hours. Additionally, they were completely waterproof and kept my feet warm and dry through all that rain and walking through streams. I was also glad that I had bought the ones with ankle support for they kept  my brittle bones and lax ligaments safe right through the trek up and down those deadly stones, licensed to fracture………..

To be continued...