Pilgrims bathe in the Ganga below the Ganga Ma temple at Gangotri.
Sadhus call in for tea at the Gangotri ashram. Hot tea was available all day.
We arrived at the Forest Office at 10:00am when it was due to open according to the sign. It was set amongst forest, a couple of kms along the main road to Gangotri, then taking 2 turnoffs up into hilly country. All signs are in Hindi of course. A Russian woman was waiting there before us for her permit, and a surprisingly large number of people milled about, some in uniform and some not. A low-in-the-pecking-order employee opened most of the doors but no-one seemed to take up any posts for some time and it was difficult to figure who was actually employed there, and of those who was going to actually do something. Eventually our lad arrived who could not speak or understand any passable English - about as much as my Hindi which is negligible and good only for chai shops; but we worked out (with the help of the taxi driver's English) that we had to Apply For Permission to enter the Gangotri National Park in order to get to Gaumukh. The walk is 18kms from Gangotri and the park gate about 1km from town. So..."can we have an application form?" There isn't one. Oh. So I made up an applicatiom form with the usual passport and visa numbers etc. It looked official. A couple of Canadian girls and a Korean arrived down from Gangotri - they had caught the 6am bus all the way back after being turned from the gate the previous day. Making up a form isn't too hard for a native English speaker, but the Russian and Korean just had to follow along.
The next step was to fax it to Dehra Dun. ...well not quite. We thought that was happening, but and hour and a half later we discovered that the forms had to be signed off by the local chief, and he was just too busy...drinking tea and reading the paper or whatever. Being rather unimpressed by this I demanded to see the head man and was promptly ushered into an underling's office. Oh yeah? I then marched with rising blood pressure into the Big Office, followed by an angry Russian. It was a big flash office, with lots of new furniture and paintwork, 10 lights burning, obligatory pictures of Gandhi etc, but no boss. I followed a protesting lacky out through another door and buttonholed the boss out the back. "Government work takes time" he pathetically protested. "Inconvenience regretted" he spluttered. I was on a roll. He then tried to explain his tardiness by saying that actually they are trying to discourage tourists from wanting the permits. Aha, so inconvenience is deliberate? Not acceptable. It went on for some time while he squirmed and signed the forms and in a couple of minutes we were off. The Canadians shared our taxi back to Gangotri and the drive further into the greatest mountain range on Earth began. For 25kms the road is being worked on - a very rough gravel one lane track. For the rest it is a mostly sealed one lane track. There are so many vehicles that several times a bus or jeep has to reverse up to allow a bus room to get around a corner or to pass by - the road has no shoulder and the drops are thousands of feet straight down. Landslips keep on eating away the edge so the roads have to be dug back into the hillside continually. The views are pretty stunning, and the changing forest cover interesting to both of us. We arrived at the pretty little town by late afternoon. It is perched on the side of a very steep valley, with steep sides that reminded Cathy of Fiordland, but with Himalayan scale. The lower reaches covered by forest of pine and deodar. All vehicles have to stop before the town as there are no roads for them (aaah, sweet release from filthy diesel and relentlessly tooting horns). It was cold - probably a good deal colder than Hawkes Bay or even Melbourne at this time of year, and it took some adjusting, as well as to the altitude of 3000 metres. We stayed at a little ashram I knew in the town and had a comfortable but simple room. Most of the foreigners there learned only about the permit after arriving and most decided to by-pass the gate one way or another.
Next day we went for a walk to visit an old friend - a Naga baba who has lived in a cave on the bank of the river 1500m upstream from the town for about 10 years. Nagas are the sometimes fierce sect of naked ash covered sadhus who are utterly fearless. (In the cold he is always clothed though). I took his photo 4 years ago (which Phil Cottingham was able to deliver to him a few weeks later) and he gave me a big hug and told me how he had gone to the plains with his shoulder bag containing his loved photos and not much else. He was using it as a pillow when it was stolen from underneath his head. That's India for you. He asked me to take some more photos, which I did upon our return from Gaumukh.
I'll have to continue this yarn tomorrow - I've had a couple of days in bed with a bug, but am on the improve. Tomorrow is our last full day here before heading to Delhi. It is also Cathy's last day of masssage treatment and lessons - more on that too. I'll keep you posted. Another heavy storm today and an unusually cool May. Lucky.
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