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So here I am, ten thousand feet above sea level, looking up at a mountain that rises the same height again, and more. North, beyond the impossible peaks of Nanda Kot and Nanda Devi, is an unimaginable range of mountains stretching far into Tibet. The glaciers on the flanks of these giants trickle meltwater into the streams that carve the ravines we have travelled through and bring water, life and a waste disposal system to towns like Bageshwar. The valleys allow roads to be built into the mountains and with the roads comes trade and transport. Lorries and taxis and motorbikes: labouring; wheezing and honking, bring in the raw materials for the burgeoning towns and villages but off the road, in mountain villages, the tiny populations cling on to an older, quieter way of life. The mountain torrents, bubbling and braided join together to form rivers: Saryu, Alaknanda, Nandakini and many others that find their way to the vast plain that lies to the east of Delhi and merge to form the Ganges, “Ganga”, one of the world’s great rivers.





The Ganges is also one of the world’s most pressured rivers; according to Wikipedia the hundred million hectares of the Gangetic Plain support one of the highest densities of humans on the planet. The pressure of these numbers pushes, like waves on a shore, against the Himalayan barrier and as the tide rises, rivulets of settlement spread up the valleys and lap against the steep mountain slopes. The population tripled in the first 80 years of the 20th century and at the same time the hunger for energy and raw materials to feed the Indian economy also grew. Quarries and hydro-electric plants are spreading and villagers take their livestock high into the foothills to find forage, burning the pine woods for a flush of green grass. Even at 3000m you are likely to find a woman up a tree with a sickle, collecting fresh oak leaves for the cattle or lichens to make henna.

At the furthest point of our journey a billion people are at my back, and there’s hardly anyone in front of me. Many of the world’s wonders and contradictions are squeezed into the four hundred or so kilometers between here and Delhi. Now there's something to see!

Nanda Devi and Nanda Kot generated so much of their own weather and wind energy that storm clouds built up in the afternoon and wind and rain lashed our tents

and the evening view from my camp bed

Dawn at our tented camp, a land of meadows, Rhododendron thickets, Himalayan Monals and Lammergeiers.

We went at the end of the Rhododendron flowering season which was fantastic but we didn't get the best views of the Himalayas from a distance and did see a lot of forest fires, smoke and haze (but see next blog post for Himalaya views!). At different times of year I'm sure there are better mountain views, different things going on and loads of different birds and animals to see.

Rhododendrons. I've been too lazy to look up the species. If anyone knows, send me an email!

Oak & Rhododendron forest at 3,000 metres

A ridge-top open air temple and out first big mountains of the trip




Our guides for the second part of our journey

Then the time came to leave Jhuni and start to climb to where the Rhododendrons began...

This is what it was all about. Village Ways is there to bring some income into remote off-road villages by making interest-free loans for renovating traditional buildings so that they can be used as community guest-houses. Village Ways guides led us on foot between villages and a rota of 'stakeholders' contributed by providing locally grown food, cooking for us and keeping the buildings running and clean.

Barley Harvest

Mountain people of Supi and Jhuni.

It was worth the journey

From Bageshwar we set off in a car to somewhere ...

More scenes from Bageshwar:
temple bells; stall-holder, goldsmith and clothes-shopping.

BAGESHWAR

Procession & Pyre

Fabric - Bageshwar Market

Six!

Graham in Bageshwar Market

A COUPLE OF HOURS IN BAGESHWAR

It was a difficult colour to describe; the colours of rust and dust combined, the same as the sky, though a little more solid, with harder shadows. It may once have been a car but whatever had happened had twisted it and burnt so that no outline, paint or soft parts survived. Perhaps its driver had misjudged one of the hairpins on the road to Bhimtal and died in flames by the torrent a thousand feet below. One of the three youths nearby is bashing it with a hammer that bounces and clangs but makes no obvious difference. The other two watch with their hands on their heads.

By the river, in the temple compound, three or four kids play a game of cricket: stumps painted onto ancient walls, plank bat, flip-flopped feet buff the shine of flagstones. A soaring six puts the ball out of play, away between the pits of the diggers who work the ribbons of pebbles left by the braided stream, now at it's lowest ebb. Nearby, not satisfied with the smoothing work of the water, a small man with a huge iron sledge shatters sharp shards of gravel from egg-shaped boulders. A buff heron watches.

On the far bank a landslide of rubbish, dotted with kingfisher-blue plastic bags spills into the river's monsoon reach, now high and dry, so two friends have no trouble scrambling onto the tongue of muck to forage. And there it is! A prize for the taller: red as blood, a third of a bottle of ketchup, hauled from the midden to brighten the evening's chapatti and dhal. Below, a woman, imperial in magenta and gold, lathers her family's washing in a pool.

Further downstream, where bubbles of suds vanish in the swirling waters, two proud grooms, sleek and fat in khaki cotton shorts, glisten and purify themselves, watched by their betrothed and two priests, safe on the bank. Two angels in cerise saris float this way across a rickety bridge.

A kingfisher flies from a web of wires, eclipsing the saris a scarlet stretcher is carried onto the riverbank, gleaming in white and gold, carried by men in mountain brown and grey who sway with the corpse across uneven cobbles towards a pyre on the water's edge. Another funeral has started. Thin logs blaze, sending a shimmering pillar of flame and smoke into the sky, deepening that colour; neither rust nor dust.

Sartri was our fourth and last stop in the Binsar Sanctuary. Then we travelled on to Bageshwar.

Throughout this trip we kept an eye open for animals and plants. Here's a list of the birds we saw click here

And then on to Sartri through our first, rather parched, islands of Rhododendron and oak forest, clinging on in an ocean of scorched pine on high north-facing slopes

Bauhinia variegata

'Our' house in Dalar and Shiva's footprints.

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