Friday was Easter and that made it a three day weekend. 8 of us who’d had about as much as we could endure of work pressures decided to hit the road and drive to the mountains. The place we chose was Ranikhet in Uttaranchal’s Almora district. Its around 370 kilometres from Delhi. The journey is the destination in such short trips so we drove to Ranikhet via Ramnagar and Jim Corbett National Park which was a tedious route with some 4 hours of ascent. We came back via Kathgodam, which cut the descent to just under 2 hours.
The good thing about Ranikhet is that you don’t get there with a list of places to see and museums/forts to gawk at. You just land up there and soak in the atmosphere and that’s exactly what we did. The only time we went out of the resort was to do some rock climbing to a height of 130 feet and rappelling back down the same cliff. That was really fun.
The rest of the time in the resort went by in fairly unremarkable fashion…lot of snooker, table tennis, cards, scrabble, etc and the drinks flowed. And lots of photos of course. Most of these are taken from the resort.
Sunrise near the Nanda Devi mountain:
View of the Nanda Devi/Trishul peaks beyond the immediate mountains. you have an ~250 km view of snow capped mountains rising beyond the immediate Kumaon/Garhwal hills.
The rock climbing site. Now this isn’t the greatest of images with the light playing havoc, but it gives a true representation of the incline.
Its a wonder how refreshing such a short trip can be!
5 comments:
Why is it that the entire world had a long 3 day weekend other than moi?
Nonetheless I still enjoyed my Sunday for that's all I always get. Yes I work saturdays too.
And Ranikhet!! Niice! I have been a gazillion and I mean a gazillion times to Nainital, but never been to Ranikhet (They are supposed to be right next to each other). The Jim Corbett (Kaladhungi)way is supposed to be shorter than the Kathgodam one though. Or atleast for Nainital.
Now I want yo go on a trip as well. NOW.
... And I've never ever been to Nainital. We wanted to go to Nainital on our way back to Delhi but because we had very little time, we made do with a place called Bhimtal.
lovely pics!
Been to Ranikhet and it is indeed beautiful, the pictures refreshed memories of that trip..they absolutely look like postcard pics
Thanks, Mukta, Scribble. I wanted to do the further 60 odd km to a place called Kausani. Kausani is special for a 200km wide view of the Himalayas. They say on a clear day you can see Everest too. But I could do only so much on a three day weekend. Sigh! Looking fwd to a Manali Leh trip this summer.
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