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Uttranchal is blessed with pilgrimage destinations which are quite remote and out of bounds during off season for the hurly burly crowd. I feel for such places which don’t have a crowd of their own, so I go there to fill the gap. For remote trekking destinations seekers, Panch Kedar is a sumptuous package of five destinations. How these 5 places are connected is also very interesting- they are connected underground by the body of a huge bull. You dig up google for panch kedars and you will know the legend. Mota motee it’s like this : Pandavas who weren’t feeling very great about killing their own kith and kin and accompanied incidental brahmahatya seeked Lord Shiva for some kind words as Shiva is the great sage. Bhima was sent to look for shiva.But Shiva was in some other nongodly-feeling mood, wandering in disguise as a bull and not ready for a discourse. Also he didn’t think much about Bhima in terms of mental capacity to understand the trappings of life and karma etc in general. So he went underground, no literally. Bhima was persistent and got hold of the hind legs and tail of the bull and managed to pull parts of the bull out of the earth. 6 in fact. Horns of the bull at PashupatiNath in Nepal, Face at Rudranath, matted hair at Kalpeshwar, Arms at Tungnath, Hump at Kedarnath,torso and navel at Madhymaheshwar. What I marvel at is that all of these places are amazingly remote, it takes atleast 1-2 days of trek to get there, are very beautiful and quite in close proxmity around Okhimath/Gopeshwar. Tungnath is the easiest to reach though. 3-4 hours of trek and the highest temple of Shiva in the himalayas at 3600+ m. The temple is more than a thousand years old. This region is the best to get views of Chowkhamba, trishul , Nandadevi among others which are many. The highest point in this trek is Chandrashila which is at 14k feet ASL. This is a local maxima and you get unobstructed views in all direction. Unfortunately I cannot provide you with this view, but I can tell you its up there.

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This must be a great inspiration for fellow ghumakkars : My friend is driving an autorickshaw for charity across india starting from cochin ending at kathmandu. This is her blog >> http://laidbackness.wordpress.com/

Read the Sms’s from all the teams here :

http://rickshawrun08w.theadventurists.com/index.php?mode=sms&sub=archive

her auto team is called Stevie wonder driving school

There are some really funny ones in there from other autorickshaw teams.

I first heard of Jalori from Kaushik. Jalori by its sheer steepness was his litmus test for his Yamaha rx100 to be able to conquer Gatta loops and Tanglangla for Leh. He would proudly tell me the pass gains 5000 feet in just 15 kms or was it 7. Anyway, the hype is what caught my attention. And since I keep a Leh drive ambition in my heart as well, I did Jalori twice this time within 6 months. The routine remains the same, start Friday night 2 am, reach by Saturday afternoon. Settle, roam around. Sunday explore adjoining areas, start by 5pm , reach delhi by monday morning 7.Trip hangovers are part of my monday blues. There are two routes for this pass (d’oh), one goes from Shimla kufri fagu theog narkanda ani, the other from Aut (kullu) Bali Banjar jibhi ghiagi shoja. In favour of the first route, you have the hatu hotel and hatu peak at narkanda as a major attraction and later the muddy sutlej as your companion. And also I think the road from this side is steeper. The second route from Aut has a few dams ( 3 starting with pandoh). For this route you don’t take the tunnel just before aut but the road on the right of the tunnel. After the Largi dam, tirthan river will accompany your drive.

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Holidays on tuesdays/thursdays –and wednessdays if you are gutsy , are devices to convert weekends into treks. This year we paid tribute to Bapu by walking 36 kms on his birthday. Sabarmati to Dandi translated to Sankhri to Har ki dhun.

We didn’t do much homework, or should I say the literature available on Har ki dhun was too little and misleading. Ideal trek for a first timer. Unless you want to temper a first timer to know trekking is serious business, it is far from ideal. I suppose since there are Forest rest house and GMVN on all stops on this trek is why it is considered easy. Another extreme factor for us was the drive. Factors like scurrying with work deadlines on Friday, lack of homework on finding the shortest route, trying to avoid the Kalsi- Chakrata gate and bad road condition, spirit of adventure trying to discover a new route, and the lure of Rajgarh waterfalls worked against us so that a drive of 540 kms thru Delhi-Solan- Rajgarh, Nauradhar-Haripurdhar-Raunhat-Tiuni took 21 hours. There is NO road after Nauradhar. It was virtually like making our own map. Don’t laugh if I tell you return journey was only 12 hours via “Via Minas”. Peculiar that it is, via-minas, as one word, is locally a very common way in Tiuni, to mean the route from Minas-Shillai-Satuan-Paonta Sahib-Pipli to Delhi. Another good route to delhi is via Mori-Purola -Naugaon-Damta-Yamuna pul–Musorrie… (more…)