Mountains and much more…

As I set off towards srinagar( in uttrakhand, not Kashmir.. mind it ;) ! ) , in a sudden ( you will know why I said “sudden”) and a hot summer afternoon from Delhi the only thing that occupied my mind was .. Please oh please ‘mera kam ho jaye, for which I am travelling so far’ … but who knew this would turn out to be such a treat, a well deserved and long awaited break from work and Delhi.

A new road … new people … new journey … unplanned excitement!

And as we moved along … it took us ten hours and couple of thousand pictures to reach here, but sometimes the journey is far more pleasurable then the destination itself. And what can I say … cool breeze in your hair, pleasurable company, nice smooth road, long trees on one side and Ganges on the other side … what more could I ask for!! Some part of me just wanted to carry on this way endlessly. The canal that had ganga water ran parallel to us for almost to a 12km stretch, and the water level was so high it seemed as if we were strolling on the bank of the river… just a few steps and you could actually touch the water.

It was refreshment if I put it in one word. Beautiful terrains, lovely music, chit chat and twilight. People often say that these mountains are standing here for so many years silently … I disagree, who said they are silent... infact I would say they know multiple languages …. They speak spooky, they speak beauty, they speak life, they speak height, they speak surprise, they speak whisper… a whisper in their own language... Different for different people and they speak change … change, the one thing everyone needs every now and then.

As we bypassed the cities one by one... and started on Rishikesh, that’s when I realized rather woke up to the fact that nature had a lot more then the boundaries of my imagination and anticipation. The long unwinding snake like mountain roads were like a treat to me … especially when you come from a city full of red lights, honks, and traffic jams! As for the roads … ya it was like a snake... but might I say a rather disfigured twisted snake (which by the way was goooooooddd)!

Stopped for dinner at 11 at a road side dhaba, nothing fancy at all … yet the only thing I would say was superb, perfectly simple fresh home cooked food, with a rhythmic background music of gushing running river behind you, blinking sparkling fireflies across the road and you perched on top of mountain in between all this… WOW!!!

Finally we all arrived in Srinagar at 2 am with a sleepy head. What followed after was like I said “unexpected”… honestly I liked Srinagar. Though I won’t say its every tourist dream destination, but the route was awesome and so is this ‘unplanned-trip-change-stay’. Today I went to see the lovely temple ‘tara devi mandir’ here…. Really pretty one must visit here, Alaknanda River being the second on the list.

… One of my favorite parts about this trip would be clicking pictures... Which I shall SOON UPLOAD so watch out. Though I caught some of the most amazing landscapes behind my lenses... but there are a few things I would never be able to capture… like the joy I am feeling right now being here, the thousands of twinkling stars outside my window smiling at me … lol if I put it in words of someone I know here “it looks like the sky has got chicken pox” , the gushing wind singing to me, the sparkling flowing water which I can listen to out here in the balcony, the random light covering the mountain here and there, suddenly running panther on the road from our car, the relaxation that has enveloped me here and much more ….. Sigh.

What more do I say, will have to be back tomorrow once my job is done here, but oh wow … its nothing like I thought… it’s more... Much more.