August 2008, Somewhere between Uttarkashi and Rishikesh.

Sorry for the lack of updates for a long time to the mini-travelogue but there has been no net access at home over a bill dispute with my ISP and to add to my run of bad luck my Mac also crashed! Regular updates should start pretty soon. And now going back to the travelogue…

We left Uttarkashi late afternoon for Rishikesh in a shared taxi. This was not a good idea as ver few travel across the mountains in the night. And this would be an eight hour drive at that. But staying back meant wasting another day so we decided to take the risk. The initial half of the ride was uneventful if a little exciting driving along ghat roads around and across mountains, the complete darkness in front of us only illuminated by the lonely beams of our taxi. Just when I was beginning to nod off we blew a tyre at the halfway stage. It was around 9pm, which is pretty late in the mountains.

Fortunately, this happened as we were passing through a small town and even more fortunately we found a shop that fixed tyres close by. It was closed though and the guy who owned the shop, who was talking to his friends nearby, was not too enthusiastic about reopening his shop in the night. But his resistance crumbled before the pleas of my fellow passengers and he got to work as can be seen in the photo above. Tyre fixed we resumed our journey and reached Rishikesh late in the night. We crashed in a hotel for the night and decided to head for Dehradun, the capital of Uttarakhand, the next day.

(To read this mini-travelogue in sequence from the beginning please go here.)