Snow Mountains…..

One of the best trips I had ever been was on its way.. for a long weekend we had. I planned a lot but looks like handling different people is not my cup of tea. Had lots of confusion till the day we left that is on 25/1/2006 evening. I will remember these silly stuffs for really long time and of course my failures in handling them. Any way at the end of the day we were 9 people on board to a wonderful trip to god’s own land Auli.

We left directly from office on 25th evening, but had to pick up few members of our team on the way as they could not get their luggage to office. This time I was joined by Naveen Tomsy, Neelkant, Ajay, Jahir Saleem, Selva Ganesh, Prakash, Gaurav and Anil Chand all in all 9 member team.

We started from noida at around 8pm our first break was to be at Haridwar. We reached Haridwar at around 1am. We broke our journey at this point for a break as we had a hectic journey ahead of us.

Early next morning of 26th we started from Haridwar through the fantastic land of mountains all around us and river ganga flowing on the other side of the mountain through out your journey. We had breakfast at Rishikesh. Here I warned saleem not to have egg as we had tough journey ahead but saleem was in no mood telling nothing’s going to hamper his spirits.. hahaha.. all eggs came out within 2 hours.

The journey from Rishikesh to Joshimath our next destination was really hard, tough and scary. As and more we went up, we could see a tiny stream of water down which in itself was a very hard river which gallops everything on its way. Even though the distance from Rishikesh to Josimath is just 240Kms it takes 10-12 hrs, you can imagine the terrain. No match to these strong mountains. Also we could see some landslides along the road. Everyone were getting very tired by the end of the day anyhow our enthu was kept alive with some VCDs we got on the way.

We reached Joshimath at around 6pm and booked a hotel over here. We can get hotel rooms at very nominal prices right from 100bugs to any amount you want. After freshening ourselves we went for some warm clothes shopping in joshimath. Once back we had wonderful dinner and everyone went to bed very early, as everyone wanted to spend every minute possible in Auli the next day.

As usual I got up every early the next day at around 6, there was no light in the hotel it was very dark I just went to the counter to check out if I could get any one for help but horror struck me when I saw a big dog “Rocky” roaming in the corridor with no man around. As soon as it saw me it came to me, I got scared a bit but it was lovely dog… it came with me all along to the counter I could not find anyone because of the darkness and I went back to bed waiting for the light to come out.

At around 7 I could see light through my window I woke up and took gaurav and prakash to rooftop. What a pleasant weather it was with huge mountains all around you. We could even see some snow caped mountains. But the best thing was when the first light of sun fell on these snow mountains it looked like golden mountains, amazing view.. I captured every moment of these in my camera.

At around 9am we started from our hotel to Auli through india’s longest and lengthiest rope way. Auli is blocked by road in winters, so we need to use ropeway to reach there. This place is not occupied by civilians, it’s a place only for skiing, you can say skiing paradise for the soft snow and slopes it provides. We reached Auli at around 10.30 everyone in the team was mad after seeing snow all around us.

This was my first experience in snow and I was really amazed to see this wonderful place. The best thing I liked in this place was this pure white snow in its undisturbed format. We could see the smooth curves of snow. It was around 2 feet snow I believe were in our foot completely went inside the snow. Here everyone enjoyed skiing for sometime. Skiing was not as that easy I thought, balancing was really tough and every one kept falling till the end. After around 2hrs of skiing everyone was very tired, so we thought of going to a near by mountain by walk you can call it a small trek in snow it was around 1.5km walk I belive, but was really difficult as oxygen level was very less and also your leg sinks in the snow making walk uncomfortable.

Anyway after a small walk through a small forest filled with snow we opened up again to a wonderful place where in many of our teammates had wonderful drink, in fact the drink they would cherish for long time. We took lots of snaps to backup our memories. We danced like mad men, but it was fun.

We could see “NandaDevi” peak from this place, this is india’s second highest peak. The time was around 3 and it was time for us to return back as the last trip back to joshimath was at around 4. We enjoyed every moment in this place any way we wanted to stay in this place for a night but it was very costly. We came back to joshimath at around 4.30 everyone was very tired and everyone had sever headache so everyone went to bed for taking rest. We could not start our journey back as we cannot travel in this place during nights.

We started early morning of 28th from joshimath back to noida. On the way back we stopped for small break near the river, this was equally good place for the peace it possessed in it. This is where Saleem got into river for a short swim, he couldn’t stay in water for even 5 min because of the chillness of water. After which we started back to noida without wasting any more time.

We reached rishikesh at around 7pm after having dinner, we had a small camp fire and danced around having lots of fun. Neel and Tomsy really enjoyed their drink dancing all around.

We were back to noida at around 12.30. End of one more wonderful trip.