Sasha_5

Leaving India...

My last day in india i spent in Srinagar. it consisted of a one-day excursion into the Himalayas. I woke up to find the mountains completely invisible behind a wall of cloud, but no-one seemed to think that this would matter.

On the way, my driver said we would stop at a market - in reality this consisted of driving into a bustling village and him bringing me tea while i sat in the car.

When we got to wherever we were going he handed me over to a guide, who set off up the mountain at a speed fast enough to get the bends. I managed to match him until the path got really steep. As usual, my heart and lungs started complaning long before my legs, and I was left huffing and puffing my way along the trail, much to my guide's amusement. Being encased in cloud meant that we were subjected to constant low-level drizzle, and after about an hour I started to hope that it was a circular route, as I wasn't looking forward to going down some of the bits that I'd barely managed to haul myself up. It wasn't. With one walking stick between us, and holding hands most of the way, we slithered and skidded our way back to the jeep.

I have no idea how high we were. I hadn't seen any snow (in fact, the pine covered mountains with cloud drifting down them leant more to my image of the Andes than the Himalayas) but i wasn't sure what the snowline was. I'd been told Srinagar was at 1700m and we'd driven for a couple of hours and walked the same again. My chest was telling me we were high. But I had a suspicion that hidden behind the clouds were real mountains - huge, barren snow-capped giants, who were laughing at my achievement, making it puny by comparison. But sadly (thankfully?) they remained hidden and I retained some sense of triumph from being as high or higher than the surrounding peaks. I felt like I had worked really hard, and for the first time since arriving in India had chosen to do something myself, and enjoyed it. I hoped this would restore some of the confidence that had been eroded by the scores of people treating me like a helpless little girl (it's a self fulfilling prophecy, the more people tell you you can't do things on your own the more you start to believe it). Things were looking up.



A photo of onw of the children with our group of people, Beautiful...