Shimla - Walk in the nature.....

From Rishikesh, Balajee and I headed to Shimla after a brief, nothing to write about stop at Chandigarh. Shimla lived up to its reputation of a beautiful hill station.

One morning we set off on a walk trying to find a meadow based on the information in our guidebook. After about two kilometers down the main road, we turned left to a mud road and were soon in the woods. Tall pine trees covering us on all sides. At one point the canopy was so thick that I felt like it was late evening though it was a hot afternoon. We walked through a path next to a beautiful stream. We were surprised by a pleasant waterfall which was about 100 feet tall. The water peacefully fell on the rock and then slowly flowed down without splashing or any hurry. We continued walking down the valley enjoying great views, expecting the road to somehow lead us back to the main road. We went on and on and we seemed to be climbing down into the valley and there was no sign of the path joining back to the main road.

We knew we were in shit but we kept digging deeper. Luckily, we found a group of cow herding women who said the only way to go back to Shimla was turning around and taking the same path we took to come here. It sounded simlpe - take back the same path. But soon we realised (me for the nth time - my friends would know about the famous compass incident) that retracing your path in a forest is difficult work. I thought we had come down one straight path but when we headed back we began to see the path breaking into two at various points. At one point, when the path split into two again, we decided to take the one going down as we could hear the stream that we had passed on our way down. But after about 15 minutes, the path just ended at the stream, except somewhere much down the stream where we hadn't come before. So we retraced back and took the other branch. It was great relief when we finally saw the waterfall that we had passed in the morning. Now we could just go back to the city but we were dog-tired after all those hours of walking and the whole way back was uphill. We were practically dead by the time we reached the main road and we had two more kilometers of uphill walk left.

Back home in Bangalore I have given lifts to any and every stranger that asked for it with a pointed thumb. So I thought this was a good time to cash in on my karma credits and tried to get a lift. For the first ten minutes not a single vehicle passed. And later not a single vehicle stopped. Then came the police who chased us away from there (But we were very happy because it showed how beaten we looked :D). So we just pulled our beaten, tired and exhausted bodies back to the city. And I decided that there was nothing called Karma.