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.

'

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