Being in India I wasn’t expecting anything clean or beautiful, for me the only purpose was finding some nice place to do meditation and I received more than expected.
The long journey
The day was long, we were hitchhiking from a little town to another little town and they were becoming so small, that the people had issues talking to us in English. This made everything a bit harder. We always were getting along by trying to communicate with hands and feets, but it was indeed hard to manage.
There was a guy, who took us with him and after around 30 min, he was dropping us. We walked to the exit of the little town and then he took us again, after he was seeing us. He wasn’t speaking any good English, but still he was smiling a lot, while helping us.
Problems started to approach us
Such a kind person, but then he was receiving a flat tire. The police were helping him, but told us that we should leave the car and make it further to our destination.
The tire was pumped up, but it didn’t seem like he was getting far with it. It was sad to see, but at the end we had another journey. The police were taking us a little bit with them and tried to help us, by stopping some random car, who at the end all wanted money from us, nothing we were aiming to do.
We were only one ride away from the city Bana wanted to go and due to the short distance and the only option to make it to the city it was getting quite easy. Not many cars drove there, but the one who did was stopping for us. He was fluent in English and was excited to be able to help us. We drove around 15-20 min up and he explained things about the places we went to. After arriving, he dropped us to a temple and left with giving us his number.
Ukhimath Omkareshwar Temple
It was time for our second temple on this trip. I am always hyped when going to places like that, because for me it was and still is something very new, so exciting. We walked down the street and the people were really nice to us. Smiling a lot and greeting us.
We had to put our shoes off and were allowed to enter the holy place. Not many people were visiting the temple due to the off season. We were taking a lot of pictures and were stopped at one place, for taking pictures of something we were not allowed, there were to our defense no signs.
I really liked being at the place, but we had no idea what to really do after. We were searching for some ideas and all made us walk to the center of Ukhimath, because Bana didn’t just want to stay in Ukhimath, he wanted to get to a holy hindu place.
Ukhimath
There was a way around the mountain, or around the mountain, but we decided to make our own path. We were hiking up the hill near the temple and were about to walk a faster way over it, not around.
People were looking at us super strange, by not understanding what our mission was. We ended up being on a football field and climbing through gardens and were lost in some racked up neighborhoods. A little guy was helping us out, to lead us to the street in the center.
To be honest, I was not believing after a while, that we could actually walk through it and that it would be a waste of time, but Bana believed in it and we were both blessed with a nice story and less distance to walk.
We were about to book a room for us for the night, to make it up the mountain the next day refreshed. It was still roughly 30 kms to reach the “basecamp” and it was getting slowly dark. We were checking and then I realized a group of a few guys were waiting for something. I walked to them and realized they also wanted to go up the hill. Due to deciding to take a shared vehicle we were getting up the mountain for a good amount of money.
Getting up the mountain
I have been on many shitty rides, hell ride in Timor Leste this one for example, and I have the feeling that most or even all of the really bad rides I am taking are in combination with Bana. To be fair, most of the time it is worse for him, he suffers more than me, but to be fair he is bringing himself into situations after taking the worst of all seats in the transportation options.
This time it was me who suffered more. I am not the best person when it comes to drinking enough water and this was something I felt there. The elevation was getting higher and higher and I was getting dizzy. The time wasn’t the most enjoyable for me, but in the end I had to manage anyway. My head was feeling terrible and I wasn’t able to enjoy it. Adding to this, it was getting very cold, we saw snow. The worst was listening to the conversations around me, but with sleeping I was able to get around that shit.
It just took literally forever!
Chopta the “basecamp”
It was time to find an accommodation, we were not thinking of making it this far. The connection was bad and it was anyway something you had to negotiate to get a good offer. We were getting a fair deal for staying two nights. How the two nights would have been we didn’t know at that time, but we felt good by getting similar rates then the locals.
After dropping our things in the room, which to be fair was a very bad looking one, we went to the “town” to grab something to eat. There were literally two options of places to choose from. The one we decided on was nice, the waiters were friendly and many people decided on that one. The food was for sure too spicy for me and due to that it wasn’t enjoyable. They for sure tried their best to make my experience as good as possible, but I am so weak with spices, that they probably never had such a case like me. The people in the kitchen were laughing at me a bit.
The whole place was actually quite nice, the local tourists were talking to us and wanted our company, so we were not alone.
We were also meeting some people from the night before out of the hotel we stayed in, they were inviting us to chill in their car with them to drink some local alcohol. It felt super weird and I don’t know why we accepted. The guy told us weird and disturbing stories of his life, from showing us a dick pic after explaining how many girls he was sleeping with, to telling us that he killed someone, but he was bribing to get out of the situation. Didn’t make us feel so great, so we ended up going to bed with weird information in our head. We also had to get up early.
The night
To be honest, normally information like that would make me think of it when laying in bed, but hell no not this night. We were getting in our “hotel” room and realized something right away. This would become a very bad night. It was inside the room colder than outside, or at least it felt that way.
There was no isolation and heating. Each had two blankets, but that was not close to being enough. We also were adding our clothes, by keeping everything on. It was freezing cold and it wasn’t easy to relax and fall asleep. Tried everything to not go down that night.
We did not have many hours to actually sleep, but we needed the sleep due to hard work afterwards. Sadly that didn’t go that well, I was waking up because of the temperature sometimes and regretted many decisions of myself these hours.
What’s up next?
You will read about how it continued, for sure worth staying tuned!
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