Himalayan adventure

I have a long cherished dream to visit Valley of Flowers. It comprises about 3o sq. km. of area in the Himalayas, which blooms with beautiful and rare flowers, growing wild, for all of about 40 days in a year. A plan to go there finally materialized in August, combining the Independence Day holiday with the weekend, and taking two days off, thus giving us a total of 5 days. The planned itinerary for our group of six was:

Tue: Take a night train from Delhi to Haridwar, reaching early morning
Wed: Pre-arranged taxi to pick us at Haridwar, and leave us at Joshimath or Govindghat by evening
Thu: Reach Govindghat, and trek 14 kms to Ghangharia
Fri: Trek 6 kms to VoF, and back to Ghangharia
Sat: Trek to Hemkund Sahib, and back through Ghangharia to Govindghat
Sun: Back to Rishikesh, and take overnight train to Delhi

The plan looked rather ambitious, but we never realized beforehand how much way off would we be! And the following details and pictures would describe what actually took place!!

We reached Haridwar after some adventure, delayed by more that three hours. As we crossed Haridwar, we could see the signs of a very recent flood in the river Ganga. We were apprehensive of the landslides in the higher regions, but there was a seasoned traveller and trekker in our group, who assured us that if landslides happen on this route, it was cleared within 2-3 hours by the Border Roads Org., which maintained the highway. Our fears put to rest, we enjoyed the beautiful weather and the scenery.

The mountains were lush green, due to the rains, and the entire route lay along the river Ganga and its tributaries - the rivers Ganga/ Alaknanda/ Mandakini were our constant companions after we crossed Rishikesh.


Many waterfalls, small and large, crossed the mountain side, some of them falling right on the road. Initially we were enchanted by them, but later some of them caused us a lot of problem.



A short distance from Rishikesh is a place called Kaudiyala, where we stopped for breakfast. The river is very wide here, as at Rishikesh. The current does not look strong, but it is actually very strong in the rains, rendering it unsafe to raft in this season. The rafting camps close down towards the end of April, when the rains start.

A little while later, we encountered our first landslide. Although a JCB and a bulldozer had been mobilized and were working on it from two ends, it took them almost five hours to clear the slide. Kilometers long queues of vehicles formed on both sides of the slide. While we waited in the hot afternoon for the way to be cleared, this black insect with golden trimmings caught our fancy.

There was another small landslide on the way, at which we had to wait for a little less than an hour. By late afternoon, we reached Devprayag. Devprayag, which meangs "holy confluence" is where Alaknanda and Bhagirathi meet to form the holy river Ganga. "Prayag" means confluence of rivers, and are considered as sacred places. Along this route, there are several "prayag's" - Karanprayag, Rudraprayag, Sonprayag, Nandprayag - all of these are holy cities, where tributaries of the Ganga meet.

We had a beautiful view of the confluence at Devprayag. We followed the course of Alaknanda from here, and reached RudraPrayag (the confluence of Alaknanda and Mandakini) by late evening - due to the delays along the way, we could manage to cover less than half the distance we had planned.