THE LAND OF FLYING LAMAS & OTHER REAL TRAVEL STORIES FROM THE INDIAN HIMALAYA by GAURAV PUNJ

Author:GAURAV PUNJ [PUNJ, GAURAV]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tranquebar
Published: 2013-12-15T16:00:00+00:00

Like all remote Himalayan regions, Jaunsar-Bawar has been traditionally a very open and equal society. In fact, if we go by a few rituals, women hold a higher place in the scheme of things. Girls choose their grooms and he has to pay the bride’s family money to compensate for their loss of an asset. Better still, divorce is completely accepted and in fact encouraged if the girl wants it. Of course, these customs are changing fast as the ‘modern/ progressive’ culture penetrates the region.

When we trek, these are the moments you wait for, moments that refresh you, make you laugh, amaze you, take away the physical pain and leave you with happy memories. Passing through Birthi village refreshed all of us, even Sangita and Sarika, as they forgot to make their customary mid-day complaints, taken in as they were by the women of Birthi. To make matters better, just above the village we came across a sea of white flowers, all sprouting from the crop planted by the villagers. Mushtaq, our expert, didn’t waste a second to tell us that it’s poppy, harvested illegally by the villagers as no one from the government ever comes here, and it provides them with some much needed cash. Several of us, drawn by curiosity, picked up a few flowers and stems and were given a demo of how it’s distilled down to its more potent, commercially available form. Out of scope of this book.

Soon we were at the first campsite. Ah, the joys of reaching a campsite after a few hours of hard trudging can only be compared to the best things in life: the arrival of your cousins to spend summer vacations with you, the arrival of rain in the last over of a match just when you are about to lose to bitter rivals, the ... okay I’m getting unnecessarily philosophical, but it truly is a special feeling. It was the same here as people who had been dragging themselves suddenly started running around barefoot, behaving like school children out on a picnic, finding their breath and voice and asking the cook for tea and pakoras. Friendly banter followed as everyone dug into their memories of the walk and took digs at each other for what they might have done or said while in an exhausted state earlier in the day. Typical campsite stuff.

The second day of the trek was easier, shorter and comparatively less eventful. We entered a thick jungle and walked all the way till the tree line, just under it rather, and pitched our campsite. I did notice, we all did, the scarcity of water sources on this part of the trek, for no apparent reason. The campsite was a nice opening in the upper reaches of the jungle and we could sense we were just a short distance from getting above the tree line where we would start seeing some snow vistas. So the evening was marked with a heightened expectation of the next day and

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.