The scenery was fantastic. We travelled through 5000m high passes, around snow covered mountains (which is really becoming a little cliche on this blog huh? A change of scenery is coming soon I promise.) We passed frozen rivers and clung to the edge of ridiculous curved highways.
Please read the previous post if you haven’t. This is a continuation of that post:
The fifth day, we hung out at camp and recovered. It ended up raining most of the day anyway, so it was good we stayed put. We’d met up with a group of three French Trekkers from Mirabel in the French Alps and were moving along with them. Rochelle, Lucianne and Benjamin were their names. They were very friendly, possibly because they chain smoked pot every time we stopped. We had some good conversations despite a bit of a communication barrier.
I made it to Srinigar in Kashmir after a long, hectic journey by share jeep. I’ll fill in some details on that soon but for now the internet is a little too slow to upload all my photos, etc. so this is just an update post to say that I’m here and I’m safe. I’m headed out for an eight day hike in the Himalayas tomorrow so I’ll be out of commission for a while.
This is probably the hardest part of my trip and I decided to do it at the very beginning. So, I haven’t been able to get too much content here. My phone doesn’t work because they don’t allow pre-paid SIM cards in the area for security reasons. And the internet is pretty slow and much more expensive than in other parts of the country.
It’s still beautiful though and the things that they make: Kashmiri carpets, pashmina shawls, Kashmiri boxes, etc. are all really incredible. I’ll have some time to write in the hills, so I’ll fill in the missing entries on Red Fort in Delhi, the crazy trip through the mountains to Srinigar, the lakes and crafts of Kashmir and my hiking trip, hopefully when I get back.
Around 1 PM it started to rain and it was a thick heavy rain. Puddles started to show up and muck everything up. Around 3 PM what seemed like heavy rain became real monsoon heavy rain. Watching it out a coffee shop window, my jaw was dropping at how hard it was coming down. By about 4:30 it was over and I headed to the metro and back to the hotel. On my walk back from the hotel, I saw some absolutely incredible stuff. First, an entire side road was flooded and had turned an intersection of a main road into a lake. I had to do some creative walking to avoid swimming, the water was literally so deep and it was flowing hard. The aftermath is pictured on the right, but that’s from an hour later and the water level had lowered dramatically.
One of them clings to my back while the other holds my hand as I walk. My bags will be right with me for the next two years and I have to protect them. But unlike kids, I get to choose them and control what they are filled up with. Here’s what I chose and what I chose to put in them:
“Humayun’s Tomb is a complex of buildings built as the Mughal Emperor Humayun’s tomb, commissioned by Humayun’s wife Hamida Banu Begum in 1562 CE.”
I asked the concierge if it was walkable and he said no, so, being a moron, I tried anyway. I wanted to see Delhi and I always feel most connected to a place when I walk through it. It was a decision I would come to regret when I arrived drenched in sweat and exhausted. Read more
