Walking in the Hills
Choose your companion carefully when you
go walking in the hills.
If you are accompanied by the wrong person –
by which I mean someone who is temperamentally very different
from you – that long hike you’ve been dreaming of could well
turn into a nightmare! This has
happened to me more than
once. The first time, many years
ago, when I accompanied a
businessman-friend to the
Pindari Glacier in Kumaon.
He was in such a hurry to
get back to his executive’s
desk in Delhi that he
set off for the glacier as
though he had a train to
catch, refusing to spend
any time admiring the
views, looking for birds
or animals, or greeting
the local inhabitants.
By the time we had left
the last dak bungalow
at Phurkia, I was ready to push him
over a cliff. He probably felt the
same way about me. On our way
down, we met a party of Delhi
University boys who were on the
same trek. They were doing it in a
leisurely, good humoured fashion.
They were very friendly and asked
me to join them. On an impulse, I
bid farewell to my previous
companion – who was only too
glad to dash downhill to where his
car was parked at Kapkete – while I
made a second ascent to the Glacier,
this time in much better company.
Unfortunately, my previous
companion had been the one with
funds, unlike my new friends.
And in Nainital I had to pawn
my watch so that I could have
enough money for the bus ride
back to Delhi. Lesson two: Always
carry enough cash with you; don’t
depend on a wealthy friend!
Of course, it’s hard to know
who will be a “good companion”
until you have actually hit the
road together. Sharing a meal or
having a couple of drinks together
is not the same as tramping along
on a dusty road with the water
bottle down to the last drop.
You cannot tell until you have
spent a night in the rain, or lost the
way in the mountains, or finished
all the food, whether both of you
have stout hearts and a readiness
for the unknown.
I like walking alone, but a good
companion is well worth finding.
He will add to the experience. “Give
me a companion of my way, be it
only to mention how the shadows
lengthen as the sun declines,”
wrote Hazlitt. Pratap was one such
companion. He had invited me to
spend a fortnight with him in his
village above the Nayar river in Pauri
Garhwal. In those days, there was
no motor-road beyond Lansdowne,
and one had to walk some thirty
miles to get to the village.
But first, one had to get to
Lansdowne. This involved getting
into a train at Dehra Dun, getting out
at Laksar (across the Ganga), getting
into another train, and then getting
out again at Najibabad and waiting
for a bus to take one through the
Tarai to Kotdwara.
Najibabad must have been
one of the least inspiring places on
earth. Hot, dusty, apparently lifeless.
We spent two hours at the busstand,
in the company of several
donkeys, also quartered there.
We were told that the area had once
been the favourite hunting-ground
of a notorious dacoit, Sultana Daku,
whose fortress overlooked the
barren plain. I could understand
him taking up dacoity – what else
was there to do in such a place – and
presumed that he looked elsewhere
for his loot, for in Nazibabad, there
was nothing worth taking. In due
course he was betrayed and hanged
by the British, when they should
instead have given him an O.B.E.
for stirring up the countryside.
There was a short branch-line
from Nazibabad to Kotdwara, but the
train wasn’t leaving that day, as the
engine-driver was unaccountably
missing. The bus-driver seemed to
be missing too, but he did eventually
turn up, a little the worse for
some late night drinking. I could
sympathize with him. If, in 1940,
Nazibabad drove you to dacoity, in
1960 it drove you to drink!
Kotdwara, a steamy little town in
the foothills, seemed to lack any sort
of character. Here we changed bases
and moved into higher regions, and
the higher we went, the nicer the
surroundings, and by the time we
reached Lansdowne, at 6,000 ft, we
were in good spirits.
The small hill-station was a
recruiting centre for the Garhwal
Rifles (and still is), and did not cater
to tourists. There were no hotels, just
a couple of tea-stalls where a meal of
dal and rice could be obtained. Pratap
had a friend who was the caretaker
of an old, little used church, and he
bedded us down in the vestry. Early
next morning we set out on our long
walk to Pratap’s village.
I have covered longer distances
on foot, but not all in one day. Thirty
miles of trudging uphill and down
and up again, most of it along a
footpath that traversed bare hillside
where the hot May sun beat down
relentlessly. Here and there we found
a little shade and spring water, which
kept us going; but we had neglected
to bring food with us apart from a
couple of rock-hard buns, probably
dating back to colonial times, which
we had picked up in Lansdowne. We
were lucky to meet a farmer who gave
us some onions and accompanied us part of the way.
Onions for lunch? Nothing better
when you’re famished.
In the West they say, ‘Never talk
to strangers.’ In the East they say,
‘Always talk to strangers.’ It was this
stranger who gave us sustenance
on the road, just as strangers had
given me company on the way
to the Pindari Glacier. On the open
road there are no strangers, you
share the same sky, the same
sunshine and shade. On the open
road we are all brothers.
The stranger went his way,
and we went ours. “Just a few
more bends,” according to Pratap,
always encouraging to the novice
plainsman. But I was to be a
hillman by the time we returned
to Dehra! Hundreds of ‘just a few
more bends,’ before we reached
the village, and I kept myself going
with my off-key rendering of the old
Harry Lander song:
‘Keep right on to the end of
the road,
Keep right on to the end?
If your way be long, let your
heart be strong,
So keep on right on round
the bend.’
By the time we’d done the last
bend, I had a good idea of how
the expression ‘going round the
bend’ had come into existence. A
maddened climber, such as I, had to
negotiate one bend too many...
But Pratap was the right sort of
companion. He adjusted his pace to
suit mine; never lost patience; kept
telling me I was a great walker. We
arrived at the village just as night fell,
and there was his mother waiting for
us with a tumbler of milk.
Milk! I’d always hated the stuff
(and still do) but that day I was
grateful for it and drank two glasses.
Fortunately it was cold. There was
plenty of milk for me to drink during my
two-week stay in the village, as
Pratap’s family possessed at least
three productive cows. The milk was
supplemented by thick rotis, made
from pounded maize, seasonal
vegetables, rice, and a species of
lentils peculiar to the area and very
difficult to digest. Health food fiends
would have approved of this fare,
but it did not agree with me.
The point I am making is that it
is always wise to carry your own food
on long hikes or treks in the hills.
Not that I could have done so, as
Pratap’s guest; he would have taken
it as an insult. By the time I got back
to Dehra – after another exhausting
trek, and more complicated bus and
train journeys – I felt quite famished
and out of sorts. I bought some eggs
and rashers from the grocery store
across the road from Astley Hall,
and made myself a scrumptious
breakfast of bacon and eggs. I am
not much of a cook, but I can
fry an egg and get the bacon
nice and crisp. My needs
are simple, really. To each
his own!
On another trek from
Mussoorie to Chamba
(before the motor-road
came into existence) I put
two tins of sardines into
my knapsack but forgot to
take along a can-opener.
Three days later I was back
in Dehra, looking very
thin indeed, and with
my sardine tins still
intact. That night I
ate the contents of both tins.
Reading an account of the same
trek undertaken by
John Lang, an early
travel writer, about a
hundred years earlier,
I was awestruck by his
description of the supplies that he
and his friends took with them.
Here he is, writing in
Charles Dickens’s magazine,
Household Words, in the issue of
January 3, 1858:
“In front of the club house our
marching established was collects,
and the one hundred and fifty collier
were laden with the baggage and
stores. There were tents? camp
tables, chairs, beds, bedding, boxes
of every kind, dozens of cases of
wine – port, sherry and claret – beer,
ducks, fowls, geese, fins, umbrellas,
great coats and the like”. He then
goes on to talk of “lobsters, oysters
and preserved soups.”
I doubt if I would have got
very far on such fare. I took the
same road
in October 1959, a century later;
on my own and without provisions
except for the aforementioned
sardine tins. By dusk I had reached
the village of Kaddukhal, where
the local shopkeeper put me up for
the night. I slept on the floor, on a
sheepskin infested by fleas. They
were all over me as soon as I lay
down, and I found it impossible to
sleep. I fled the shop before dawn.
“Don’t go out before daylight,”
warned my host, “there are
bears around.” But I would sooner have faced
a bear than that onslaught from the
denizens of the sheepskin. And I
reached Chamba in time for an early
morning cup of tea. Sleeping out, under the stars, is
a very romantic conception. “Stones
thy pillow, earth thy bed,” goes an
old hymn, but a rolled up towel or
shirt will make a more comfortable
pillow. Do not settle down to sleep on
sloping ground as I did once when
I was a Boy Scout during my prepschool
days. We had camped at Tara
Devi, in the outskirts of Shimla, and as it
was warm night I decided to sleep
outside our tent. In the middle of the
night I began to roll. Once you start
rolling on a steep hillside, you don’t
stop. Had it not been for a thorny dogrose
bush, which halted my descent, I might well
have rolled over the edge
of a precipice. I had a wonderful night once,
sleeping on the sand on the banks of
the Ganga above Rishikesh. It was a
balmy night, with just a faint breeze
blowing across the river, and as I lay
there looking up at the stars, the lines
of a poem by R.L. Stevenson kept
running through my head:
Give to me the life I love,
Let the love go by me,
Give the jolly heaven above
And the byway nigh me.
Bed in the bush with stars to see,
Bread I dip in the river-
There’s the life for a man like me,
There’s the life forever.
The following night I tried to
repeat the experience, but ‘the jolly
heaven above’ opened up in the early
hours, the rain came pelting down,
and I had to run for shelter to the
nearest Ashram. Never take Mother
Nature for granted! The best kind of walk, and this
applies to the plains as well as to the
hills, is the one in which you have
no particular destination when you
set out.
‘Where are you off?’ asked a friend
of me the other day, when he met me
on the road.
‘Honestly, I have no idea,’ I said,
and I was telling the truth.
I did end up in Happy Valley,
where I met an old friend whom
I hadn’t seen for years. When we
were boys, his mother used to tell us
stories about the bhoots and prets
(ghosts) that haunted her village
near Mathura. We reminisced and
then we went our different ways;
I took the road to Hathipaon and
met a schoolgirl who covered ten
miles every day on her way to and
from her school. So there were still
people who used their legs, though
out of necessity rather than choice.
Anyway, she gave me a story to
write, and thus I ended the day with
two stories, one a memoir and the
other based on a fresh encounter.
And all because I had set out without
a plan. The adventure is not in
getting somewhere, it’s in the
on-the-way experience. It is not
the expected; it’s the surprise. Not
the fulfi lment of prophecy, but
the providence of something better
than that prophesied.
Ruskin Bond lives in Mussoorie,
India. Reprinted with the permission of
India Perspectives.
By Ruskin Bond
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