It has been a while I have managed to write anything on Ghumakkar. A travel related project I was trying to feature elsewhere was keeping me busy and occupied. This post is about the project.

For a long time, I had been thinking that Walking Tours are not very popular in India. In many countries, especially in the west, there are many recognized walking trails, and organized group tours that involve walking in cities. There are very few such walks in India that I have heard of - Bangalore Walks and Intach’s Delhi Walk being some of them. But such initiatives are few.

I then hit upon the idea - why not try to promote walks? With this idea, I conceived a plan to publish a series of walking trails in India, which showcases some interesting walking trails from all over the country. It not only limits to cities, but also covers some unlikely places like sand dunes of the desert, walks in snow and thick forests. The walks have all the necessary details, like map, best season to walk, difficulty level, images from the place along with description of the walk. I have reproduced one such walks here, from Old Delhi. See more walks on India Travel Blog, the series is already halfway, and will be running till the end of this month.

Walks in India: Old Delhi

This post is part of a series on ‘Walks in India‘.
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Besides my near perennial disease of writer’s block, I am also low on time which is holding me back from writing long boring essays and sign off with glee to torture my readers. That said, a couple of photo essays I published in the past seem to have been well received. Allow me to continue, on a fictitious public demand!

A lot of my journeys, especially in winters, have been done in search of winged friends. Although not as much as a few of my fanatic naturalist friends, I keep an eye on them when I travel, or sometimes do travel-for-birding. The places where I have chased them are spread all over the country. I was part of the first eco-tourist group to travel to Arunachal’s Eaglenest National Park which showed me in its forests some insanely colorful birds hardly seen anywhere. And in the early days of my birding, I passed off a picture of an extremely rare pair of Grandalas as more common Whistling Thrushes. The picture caused a minor excitement when I posted it on a mailing list and the experts probably pitied me for passing it off for something mundane. But most encounters are of common birds in the south, from places in and around where I live.

I wish I could start off with our National Bird Peacock, but unfortunately, common as they may be, I don’t have a worthy image of these majestic birds yet. So I will start with something smaller, nevertheless beautiful, state bird of Karnataka - Indian Roller. It is called ‘Neelakantha’ in Kannada.

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Breathtaking vistas of deep valleys and mountains high enough that they pain the neck when looking up, rivers that run wild and unstoppable in its valleys supported from the melting snow, lakes clear and deep which remain so calm that only the reflections of the snowy mountains can be seen but not its surface - a few things that come in my mind when I remember the Himalayas. There are snow capped tips that dazzle in the brilliance of mid-day sun. Early morning and evening sun burns the peaks in orange splendor. Trees are so tall that they seem to be making a vain attempt to compete with the mountain itself.

These mountains are a celebration of nature. From the time I was planning my first ever trip to the Himalayas, I had been dreaming about all these and was fortunate to witness what were once mere photographs dancing in my mind morph into real wonder in my eyes.

Since my first visit to the high country at Sikkim, I have been seeing much more than the superb scenery of gigantic proportions. My eyes and my mind were caught up with tiny flowers that fill the trees or carpet the floor. When we hiked up to Gochela Pass walking forty kilometers in four days, trees were coloured by flowers and the forest shied away from traditional green. They bloomed en masse with splatters of pink, orange and white. Nature never ceases to entertain - when it was done working with the trees it spread colors all over the floor in white, purple and red. It was a big flower fest.

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The temperatures are slowly raising from the lows of the winter, and as the mercury is moving up, I am reminded of the cooler climes of the high mountains. The days are still pleasant where I live, and it is still early to approach the mighty Himalayas, but the dream of these mountains is already haunting me. A few images from the highlands from my past sojourns.

Evening sun on Nanda Devi.

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