As most of our friends and family are aware of by now, Jen and I have returned from India and Thailand. In fact, we are now busy preparing for our return trip to Asia, where we will serve for two years in Cambodia with the U.S. Peace Corps. During our preparations, Jen has created a photo journal of our most recent travels. It will feature five hundred of our favorite photos and the blog entries from our trip and will be for sale to anyone interested. Please contact us for more information.
And so, for her project, we decided to finally write about the last leg of our journey through India: a weeklong trek in the mighty Himalaya…
In our last entry, we had just left behind the sadhu-filled streets along the holy Ganga River in Rishikesh. Taking India’s now infamous public transportation we arrived back in Sonapani wobbly legged after a four-hour drive up winding mountain roads. We stayed for only two nights packing our bags for our trek to the Pindari Glacier, where Ashish had organized a first class expedition through his local connections.
We left early in the morning on the sixth of May, driving seven hours north to the small town of Saung. Our driver was a short Indian man with a cowboy hat and large aviator sunglasses. We stopped in Bageshwar along the way to pick up our trekking guide, Ganesh. He was about our age and spoke only broken English. We continued up the steep mountain roads, with large gray clouds building above our heads echoing thunder over the tall, still hidden peaks of the Himalaya.
At Saung we met Naresh, our donkey-wala in charge of hauling all of the food and equipment up the Pindari valley. That night we slept at eight thousand feet amidst terraced mountain slopes, rich green oak forests, and small hamlets that still live in a world where electricity and running water are myths from a distant future. Grasshoppers chirped loudly as we fell asleep and dogs howled all night throughout the valley.
The next morning began early; up at 5:15 am with a cup of steaming chai, we started the day refreshed and energized. We ate a breakfast of roti, sabzi, and porridge. Ganesh hustled about the camp with the exuberance that comes with youth and loyalty. The donkey was loaded by 7:30 and we embarked with the sun already blazing down on our backs. The first day’s climb was steep and rocky, but an otherwise arduous hike was made pleasant by massive oak trees and sunbathing lizards keeping us company. The infrastructure along the trail was very developed and we had the ability to drink anything from chai to 7-Up. We saw many people at chai shops and on the trail, mostly locals and a few other trekking groups. We reached the one-and-only pass of our trek by mid-day after gaining 4,500 feet in under ten miles, where we ate lunch and meditated at a small temple. Jen was blown away by her first glimpse of the Himalaya up close. That night we slept at Dhakuri, a small camp made up of a couple chai shops and rest houses.
We woke up the next morning at over ten thousand feet to the sounds of morning bird songs and donkey bells. I climbed out of my sleeping bag with great effort and opened the tent door. Staring at me straight in the eye was a panorama of peaks, standing over twenty thousand feet tall, just beginning to light up from the summit down. I clambered out into the dew-soaked dawn and stumbled to the chai-wala. He prepared two steaming cups of over sweetened tea, which I brought back to Jen still keeping warm in her sleeping bag. We watched the perfect, straight rays of the sun slowly illuminate the ridges of the snow-covered range across the valley.
Setting out after breakfast we began the longest leg of our trek – twenty-one kilometers up the glacial valley to a small, cold camp perched at the confluence of the Pindari River and a small glacier-fed tributary. We passed through ancient forests filled with the sound of small bells announcing the presence of hidden cows. Two dogs followed us several kilometers, dodging and weaving between our feet and keeping away less friendly canines. At lunch we stopped in Khati. A small, hidden village tucked deep away in the folds of the long valley, Khati was easily the most romantic place Jen and I had ever seen. The whole town was built into a terraced slope and the buildings were made of local stone with flat, rectangular mica slabs used for roofs. Wheat was laid out to dry on almost every roof and several acres of more wheat spread out below the houses, filled with women toiling in the afternoon sun. Children ran through the narrow streets, coming and going from a single room schoolhouse above the village. Men smoked bidis and watched us lazily with little interest.
By the third day, waking up cold and sore, we were beginning to feel the strain of our long journey to the Pindari Glacier. But we could afford our bodies little rest because we still faced the most challenging leg of our hike; we had to climb to zero-point by early afternoon, a five thousand foot elevation gain in under 7 miles. Aided by the omnipresent trekker’s chai and jaw-dropping views of the thundering Pindari River below us, however, we persevered all the way to the end of the trail with little trouble. Along the way we saw a Himalayan Monal, a resplendent bird considered an elusive delicacy to the locals.
Arriving at zero-point, we had hardly set up camp before our donkey-wala, Naresh, urged us to follow him to a large stone temple that seemed to emerge from the boulder-strewn fields above us. He wanted us to pay our respects to the only resident of zero-point – a boisterous baba famous for his hospitality and cooking. We had been told about the “zero-point baba” from our friend Ashish before we embarked on our trek, and so we were very eager to meet him in person. We entered his home through a small doorway built into a chest-high stonewall that surrounded the small temple grounds. Our guides greeted the baba with reverential awe and he quickly offered all of us chai. I was surprised to see a very healthy, not-quite-middle age Indian wearing a tattered pink down jacket smiling at us with a fantastic set of pearl white teeth. That evening we watched him cook sabzi and puri over several small gas stoves inside his dark, cozy kitchen while he discussed everything from politics to astro-physics with anyone willing to lend an ear. We sat in silence mostly, simply observing a holy man hard at work.
We retired for the night early, as a light snow had begun to fall at dusk. While drifting to sleep, a mighty trumpeting shook the valley as the baba blew forcefully into a conk shell to begin his nighttime puja to Nandadevi, the local mountain deity. In the middle of the night I awoke from a deep slumber, propelled by a dream to climb out of my sleeping bag. My breath billowed before me as I unzipped the ice-covered vestibule and stumbled into the night. Snow crunched under my feet as I stood up and moved away from our tent. As I slowly turned around, looking in every direction, I felt my heart pound quickly; above me, solid snow spires of unimaginable beauty stretched into the starry sky. The cold rushed into my veins alongside an ineffable joy. The bone-like radiance of the full moon cast night shadows thousands of feet long and illuminated the valley in a sharp, unreal glow. The pain of the sub-zero air closed in on me too quickly though, and so I could only remain transfixed for two short moments before I retreated back into the tent. I woke up Jen and she went outside to see the same spectacular views. Soon we were both fast asleep again.
In the morning we woke up to a flock of noisy choughs piercing the frostbitten dawn. After downing our morning chai, we trudged up the last bit of the glacial valley with Ganesh and photographed the massive peaks that had been hidden the previous afternoon by clouds. The Pindari Glacier was a wrinkled, sky blue field of ice just a quarter of a mile away. We stood on the high lateral moraine deposited by the glacier a hundred years before, reminding us of the battle it is slowly losing against a warming climate. We left the glacier behind and floated back down to the camp to eat breakfast with the baba before starting our descent back to Dwali.
The return hike back down the Pindary valley took us three more days. We walked slowly and deliberately – taking our time to imbibe the natural beauty of the mountains. We decided to stay in Khati for a night, rather than hike the long leg from Dwali to Dhakuri. Thunderstorms had rolled into the valley and left us drenched to the bone. We decided to rent an old timber cabin for two dollars rather than freeze in our small, damp tent. That evening we sat around a smoky fire with three older Indians from Gujurat and listened to their wizened guide tell tales in loud, rough Hindi. We met several other trekkers heading up to the glacier, eager to learn about the weather. It turns out we had been fated with a stroke of luck, because the thunderstorms had left behind over two feet of snow at zero-point, making the hike nearly impossible for the newcomers.
By the time our trek ended on the morning of the eighth day, we were both eager to head back to Sonapani. Our bodies were spent. However, the goodbyes to Ganesh and Naresh were bittersweet because we knew that leaving behind the Pindari valley was the beginning of our long trip home. We passed through high hill country filled with wheat and potato terraces, whitewashed homes with blue doors, and small families tilling fields with ancient oxen. The drive down from the Himalaya was like a drive lost in time. Jen and I both felt as though we had entered a dream, shaken by a nostalgia that seemed to come from a past life; every valley and village evoked memories that originated from places we had never been and times we could not recall. We entered a separate reality that drew us in and created an inexplicable loss for loved ones we never knew. It felt as though we had slipped through the cracks of our modern world and shortly lived in a parallel universe immortalized in fairy tales. We had said goodbye to India.
