Ok, now a good travel story:

Last weekend, I traveled up into the foothills of the Himalayas, in Himachel Pradesh.

I went there sort of chasing a fantasy of adventure.  Having heard that Chandigarh was not the most interesting of towns, but that it was a quick ride from the Himalayas, I started reading the Lonely Planet on our Thursday evening train to Chandigarh.  I was pretty captivated, and had to put the book away when I began planning skipping the week of class to go trekking across glaciers to visit the Dalai Lama.  I did decide to go up to Shimla for the weekend—a very feasible four hour bus ride, and the gateway to the mountain towns.  I spent most of Friday’s lectures daydreaming about wandering high fields and forests.

I got up early on Saturday and caught a 6am bus.  I was alone—I had tried to recruit other IHPers for the weekend, but no one was in quite the same plan-less, adventurous spirit.  I had a very nice seatmate—he was heading home from school in Cahndigarh for a festival, and we spent a good part of the ride up trading off iPods, listening to traditional Indian drumming and traditional American blues music.  The drive up was itself beautiful, climbing from the hot, dry valley up almost 2500 meters through wooded hills and terraced farms.

By mid-morning, I was in Shimla, a town perched on top of a steep ridge, seemingly just barely holding on.  The town served as the summer capital of India during the days of British rule—the British were just as interested in escaping Delhi’s heat and humidity as I was—so there’s a really curious mix of British colonial and traditional Indian buildings.

I didn’t really have a plan, so I started wandering up through the town, walked through the main square, and then kept walking, along a quiet road, out the other side of town.  I saw a trail leading up from the road, and followed it up to the top of the hill, to a cute, little temple surrounded by monkeys.  After some time there, I kept walking along the trail, tracing the ridge up and over, and eventually down to the next town, passing by a Buddhist monastery and a lot more monkeys.

 

I found a small restaurant to have some lunch. While I was eating, the young man sitting across from me started a conversation, in somewhat stilted English.  I don’t remember exactly what we were talking about, but it was engaging and personal, and I was happy to find someone to talk to.  When I’d finished, I asked Nitin, my new friend, what places I should check out around Shimla.  He suggested a hike a few kilometers up the road, then said he was headed there as well, then took me to the bus stop and got on the bus with me.

It was a nice little hike, unfortunately without the view of the Himalayan peaks because it was a foggy day, but Nitin made for good company.  We talked a lot about his life and his home town, and when we’d walked back down to the main road, he asked if I’d like to accompany him to go see his village.  I sort of laughed off the idea—he was clearly a kind soul, but it seemed like too much of a burden on this guy I’d known for only a few hours for him to feed and house me in his village.  But he persisted and I agreed.

We took the bus another hour and a half up the road, though some daring fog.  It was dark by the time we got off the bus, and from there it was a long walk, by cell phone flash light, down from the ridge into the valley.  A few hundred meters above the house, we came out from the woods into a clearing, and by moonlight and a few faint lights from homes scattered around, I got my first sense of the deep, beautiful valley. 

The family—Nitin’s parents and brother—was amazingly gracious.  Nitin was the only one who spoke any English, but our non-verbal interactions were incredibly warm.

In the morning, I walked around the farm some.  It’s a lovely place, with apple orchards and hay fields terraced into the hill side, and long views.  After a delicious breakfast, we trekked back up to the main road—a much longer trip than I had remembered.  We waited up on the ridge for about an hour for the bus, watching mules loaded with boxes of apples climbing up to the road, where the boxes were piled high into typically decorated trucks.

 I rode back to Shimla, then back down to Chandigarh, after a wonderfully spontaneous, adventurous, friendly weekend.