Hill Station Blues
Don’t worry. I’m having a wonderful time on break; I just can’t resist employing lame wordplay when coming up with post titles.
I’m in a cyber-cafe in Nainital writing this post. I left my computer in Lucknow so that I would have less stuff to worry about on the train. Our train arrived in Lucknow about three hours behind schedule so we all got to sit on the dirty, smelly ground at the station for a while until benches opened up. There were dogs and cows pacing up and down the platform which were fun to watch. It took us a while to find our berths, but once I had my things situated and had lain myself down I fell asleep and remember little of the next nine hours.
I awoke to the sound of the chai-wallah selling morning tea. My friends Allen and Jessica who were nearby also got up. We enjoyed a light snack with our chai and talked with our new friend Ahmet. When we got off the train at Kathgodan Ahmet helped us negotiate a good price for a car to Nainital. The train doesn’t even go up here because it’s too high in the mountains. We enjoyed an amazing drive up the winding road through forests of greenest green and an alarmingly small amount of honking.
Nainital is a hill station, nestled at the foot of the Himalayas, where people from Delhi and surrounding areas like to come to escape the hottest part of the year. It’s very busy from March to June, but as far as I’m concerned, now is the time to be here because prices are good and the mood is laid-back.
Allen & I are on a budget but we’ve found lots of fun stuff to do on the cheap. One can simply walk around and appreciate the lake, the low-lying and misty clouds, or walk around the hilly streets. We spent yesterday morning taking a cable car up to a hotel/tourist trap area but then busted through a fence and hiked around for a bit. The terrain was intensely steep and slippery so we mostly hewed to a mountain road nearby and climbed several kilometers (how many hectares in a kilometer, again? We may have only traveled a hundred yards) toward some beautiful peaks with views of the Himalayas. We ended up on a very quiet peak and enjoyed the silence for a while. One can reportedly see China from where we stood and I’m inclined to agree just because that means I can cross China off my list of travel plans. What more is there to see, really?
One can even find basketball in Nainital. There is an area called ‘the Flats’ next to the lake which was leveled by an earthquake and never rebuilt. It serves as a park and sporting complex for the city. There are kids playing football (soccer), cricket and basketball. Allen & I have been putting on a sort of roundball clinic for the local kids and they’ve been correcting our poor Hindi. Too much fun.
This place has wonderful fauna as well. The dogs and cows here, as ubiquitous as they are in the rest of India, seem fatter and happier than other places I’ve seen. There are lots of cats, too. Best of all, though, are the scores of monkeys I’ve been able to see. (The monsoon has brough a lot of monkeys out in Lucknow recently but nothing like this.) The first morning at our lovely hotel I though someone was banging on our door. When I woke up I realized what it actually was: a team of monkeys jogging and jumping from rooftop to rooftop running along the tin roof of the hotel. —If you come to Nainital the Hotel Bengal will give you a room for about 6 dollars a night; worth every penny.
Today we’re having a mellow day. It’s rained most of the morning and we have work to do. Allen & I decided to split up so that we can avoid speaking English as much as possible.
We leave for Lucknow on Sunday evening. I’ll try to post again there to let everyone know how the trip went.
