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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Our Village Ways guides in the Binsar Sanctuary: Deepak (who found the Mantis) and Kheem (who was very patient).

Mantis with prey

A Crested Serpent-Eagle and sunset with Bananas, Pine and a haystack, both photographs fromRinsal.

A pathside oak still smouldering after a forest fire has swept through the understorey.

Our journey, which we organized through inntravel working in collaboration with an Indian non-governmental organization called Village Ways (more on both of these later), was about to start as we were dropped by taxi at the Khali Estate in the Binsar Sanctuary. This is where the walking started.

Our first walks were through the Binsar Sanctuary, from Khali to Dalar, Rinsal and then on to Sartri; villages inaccessible by road. The valley floors are terraced for crops: wheat and barley when we were there, rice in the wet season and there are villages and towns dotted along the valley roads and spreading up into the lower hills.

The hills themselves are blanketed in forest of Pine: Pinus roxburghii. This is a dry time of year here and it has been a particularly arid winter so the layer of pine needles burns like tinder and much of the pine woodland was either on fire or had been recently burnt. The air here was smoky and the views limited. The locals say the fires are started by accident. My guess is that at least some are started on purpose so that the flush of grass that follows fires can be used by the flocks of cattle that are taken up into the hills to graze.

A country of magical women

Moving up

...and we drove right up into the... foothills of the Himalayas, into the State of Uttarakhand, where the slopes are terraced for rice, wheat and barley; where they say The Mahabharata was written and where tree-hugging was invented (if you believe Wikipedia, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chipko_movement )

A mystic at Kathgodam Station

The journey from Kathgodam into the mountains involved quite a lot of driving. There were some people coming the other way.

Railside

The railway crossed the great plain between Delhi and the Himalayas: across the Ganges, with rafts of Water Hyacinth; through farmland; villages and trackside shanty towns.

The sleeper train took us from Old Delhi Station to Kathgodam, an old timber depot on the edge of the Himalayan foothills. This was our first experience of Indian rail travel.