Trip to Gaumukh

The road to Gangotri is sometimes carved from rock and the drops are precipitous for thousands of feet.




Well, the newspaper taxi seemed like a good idea. We arrived at the newspaper stand at the appointed 5am and indeed the jeep pulled in and added us to the already squeezed in crowd. Then picked up a few more, one of whom had more luggage to go on the roof than all the rest put together which made it quite top-heavy. The driver, who had spent a lot of time on his mobile phone, then handed over to the actual driver who was sound alseep when thrown into the driver's seat. He looked to me like he had had a hard night on the whisky and no sleep. Thinking that we were set to go, the jeep then headed straight across the road to the tyre repair "workshop". They decided to fix the spare. I counted about 10 patches on one side of the bulging tube, the tyre itself looked like it had been ground down on an angle grinder so the metal was poking out, and it had a large hole - but, hey, it was "only" the spare. Then they repaired the back rear tube. It was better but still had a few patches. An hour late, we headed up into the mountains. At first the road was excellent, and as soon as the jeep reached 50kmh the steering wheel shuddered so violently he could hardly hold it on the road, but luckily the road is so windy and speeds so slow that that was rarely a problem. The driver yawned once too often and I remonstrated as did other passengers and he stopped for water to freshen up. We arrived at Uttarkashi 6 or so hours later and decided that we had had enough mountain roads for one day, found a hotel and went straight to sleep.
In the afternoon we wandered about the town and checked out the jeep taxi stand for the next day's journey. A driver suggested we start around 6am for Gangotri. A stroll down a side road found the government Tourist Bungalow, and having never stayed in one was curious to know the costs. Serendipity. As soon as we walked in we saw a notice on the wall to the effect that all tourists and pilgrims who want to walk from Gangotri to Gaumukh now have to have a permit, which is issued only from Uttarkashi Forest Office or the headquarters at Dehra Dun which opens at 10am. We returned to the taxi driver and had no choice but to hire a jeep for just ourselves, at considerable extra cost. That done, he picked us up at the hotel in a brand new jeep with new tyres (!) and drove us to the Forest Office.
...to be contd.