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Peak of excitement Kedarnath as seen from Ukhimath

Wish to get away from the urban buzz and spend some weeks in solitude? The Himlayas could be the perfect destination. Board the Chennai-Dehradun Express and during the two-day journey you can get to see some lovely scenes of rural India. Alight on the banks of the Ganges at Haridwar. From there on, all the mountain views are yours.

Two days of train travel can be tiresome but not if you have interesting co-passengers. Pechimuthu and his wife Bhagyalakshmi are farmers from Vasudevanallur in Thirunelveli. They were travelling with their daughter Karthika Devi to see their son Karthik Raj, a first generation learner and now, an Army Captain at Dehradun. Senior citizens Kalyani and Rajagopal were on their way to meet their son Mukesh, a wing commander in the Air Force at Rourkee.

The train moved out of Tamil Nadu and chugged through Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, New Delhi, Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand. I was heading towards Ukhimath, the winter abode of Lord Kedarnath and Madhyamaheshwar.

It was too cold to think of a dip in the Ganges, tranquil yet deep at Haridwar. But to see the sun’s reflection on the shimmering sheet of water with a swarm of gulls raising a racket as they flapped their wings, the devout offering prayers by floating burning camphor with flowers on leaf cups, filled me up with an immense calm.

My first tour of the Himalayas was with 33 members of the Akshara Foundations. I have heard people say that the Himalayas has a certain power of attraction. Truly, for I went alone the next year on an unplanned visit. Ukhimath is a quiet village about 4,600 feet above sea level. Unlike Gaurikund, the base station for a trek to Kedarnath, Ukhimath is better off with less crowds and a more conducive weather throughout the year. Even a view from the room window is a magnificent spectacle — a faint fragrance of the pine and the deodar wafts by, the sky now grey, now misty, now cloudy and now a clear blue with mountain-shaped clouds, the Mandakini deep beneath seems like a white twine thread and the big car moves like a child’s toy on the bridge at Kund. There’s snowfall high up on the mountain peaks, which glistens in a golden orange when the sun sets. There is a mysterious silence at night, when the wind whistles and howls and the roar of the flowing water several miles away fills the air.

When it was time to wind up, I was filled to the brim with the refreshing mountain views. I took the 5.30 a.m. Himgiri bus to Haridwar, travelling past the dense fog at Srikot and Srinagar and from there took another bus to Dehradun through the reserve forests.

A computer error in my railway ticket gave me the experience of shifting five compartments during my return journey from Dehradun. I got a taste of India in the tiny unreserved women’s compartment. A bold Punjabi housewife was vociferously making men vacate the compartment. “Women have power and it should be used when required,” she told me. I moved to my allotted seat at Saharanpur, where some Tamilians travelling from Chandigarh gave me all the strength and support I needed in my fight to get a seat. The servers from the pantry were confused to see me now here and now there. “Where are you going now?” one man asked. “I don’t know next where I will be shunted,” I replied in Hindi as a woman seated next to me laughed.

That was in essence my journey to the Himalayas, not planning where to go and what to do, but just flowing as the Mandakini does at Ukhimath.

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