Our trail was up and down over stones, tree trunks and crossing a couple of streams. We even witnessed last patch of ice around the streams. Arjun showed me how the place must be buried under snow as evident from flattened branches of shrubs. The forest was mainly comprised of Oak trees but there were others including Bhoj tree from where bhoj patracomes from. We were constantly descending and my knees started showing signs of wavering on trying to descend. As treking pole I picked up one tree branch and broke it in couple of strokes to make it suitable to which Arjun complimented that I have become a pro now.
We finally started at 5:45 AM and straight hit the road to Gangotri. The twists and turns were churning my stomach and sleep was dozing me off. I got woken up couple of times due to being thrown away by swerves. The journey up was not very exciting. There was no river following our route as Bhagirathi (or Ganga) comes into picture only near Tehri. There was lot of haze due to which mountains and landscape was not looking great. The road was broken at many places due to landslide and due to dryness, there was lot of dust blowing from passing vehicles. The mountain face also looked scarred at many places due to debris from landslide and construction spreading over it. The weather was unnaturally very hot and devoid of moisture because of which loose earth of rubble was flying & getting all over you. Finally the river was seen with muddy color but very less flow. The reduced flow turned out was due to ice having started to melt only now and river would be in full flow in June.
With the advent of Duronto non-stop trains there is a possibility to avail these trains if your destination is on the route close to eventual destination of the train and it is a technical halt of the train. Every long distance train has some technical halts where crew changes. If your destination is one such then it could be a boon. For example, Mumbai – Howrah Duronto has technical halts at Bhusaval, Nagpur, Bilaspur, TataNagar. So, people who are destined to let’s say Bilaspur or Tata Nagar can book the entire journey from Mumbai to Howrah but get down at these stations when trains stop there. In my recent journey from Mumbai to Howrah, there were several such passengers who got down at Tata Nagar and Kharagpur. You may just have to pay extra upto Howrah for this convenience. Railways does not publish a list of technical halts for a train but you can easily figure them out by experience, talking to train crew, passengers or characteristics that it is a major station, change of railway division and around 5-7 hours from previous technical halt.
