The taxi, due to turn up at 9:30, turns up at 8:30 as we just start having breakfast. Scott was picked up from the apartments en-route and since he was also expecting to be collected circa 9:30 hasn’t had breakfast and so takes it with us. This is not unusual practice by all accounts. Taxi drivers turning up well before and after time, not Scott having breakfast somewhere else. But then again Scott has practiced some unusual eating habits in the past as we later find out. We make him wait – the taxi dr... err I’m not doing that again! – and leave when “Alan. Alan. Alan” eventually sorts his shit out about 9:45, ha ha! We head off to, well we thought it was just a trip up to Mussoorie but Alan asks the driver to go first to Kempty Falls.
It’s nice to go on a trip with some other guys – we’re all about the same age, except Scott who’s probably very late 20’s/early 30’s and we’re all similarly motivated to have brought ourselves here under our own finances. (Whilst the training/certification is certainly much cheaper than the UK, for example, it still isn’t cheap and I haven’t yet met anyone who’s trip is not self-financed. This speaks volumes about the commitment of everyone I’ve met here, but I’ll come back to this topic another time. ) – and we get on really well.
We’re in a small people carrier vehicle in a 2-2-2 formation and the driver is a competent, steady driver, but like all Indians, he knows how to use his horn. We joke that to pass the test in India you only need to know how to operate the horn, but as a quick Google I’ve just done has shown, this is of course utter rubbish, you’ve also got to be able to do a U-turn, two of them. (http://www.insideline.com/features/driving-test-indian-style.html)
As we wind our way uphill and remark on the twists and turns, Scott informs us he has a friend with family in the area and has been told it gets much much twistier and that there are some bends where if you dare to look down, you will see the remnants of other less fortunate taxis. And he’s not joking. Windy windy we go, up along the un-ironed creases of hillsides that make up the foothills of the Himalayas. I look up and see cars high above us swooping about in the same manner as us, just further along their journey upwards. Horns blare and overtakes happen. Both by us and of us. On straights, on open bends, on blind bends. Traffic meets and just doesn’t hit, often literally only just. (BTW that article about the driving test in India also says there are about 85,000 deaths a year on the road and that is second only to China in the league of most dangerous place to drive (and presumably also be driven) in the world!
After much winding we pass a “humorously named” Snowy View Restaurant perched on the side of the ride and then see it does actually have a snowy view and it’s just…Wow! My and the other guys’ reaction is just like when we came out of a tunnel in Switzerland to see the snowy alps for the first time – jaw dropping.
OK, time to start videoing out of the window. It never works particularly well filming sideways and you can’t really see anything of the mountains with the 10-20mm lens so I turn its attention forwards. There’s a truck in front of us and I film a few seconds from car roof height and then bring the camera in. Not more than 5 seconds later a tight right hand bend comes up (India drives on the proper side of the road, i.e. left) and the truck that is 3-5 metres in front of us doesn’t turn and just crashes into the wall with a thump and an instant stop. Damn I’d just switched my camera off! OK, we’re only doing about 15-20 mph but have to emergency stop. What the hell happened? The guy just didn’t turn! The bend had another lane joining down and into our road and the truck has crashed into the step from this road. We try and reverse, our driver waving his hand and we’re met with incessant beeping as other cars just squeeze on past us. When we do back up enough to clear and pass we see the truck, embedded onto the step. What the …?
A bit further we ask our driver to stop so we can just get some photos. It’s still just…wow!
We all indulge ourselves as tourists – well we are so why not – and snap away. A bottle of Coke or Sprite each at least helps to fund the little shop/café we’ve stopped at. The price at 25 rupees is slightly above the MRP (maximum retail price) – which most things, especially foodstuffs have printed on them here – of 22 but at 33p for a 500ml bottle it’s still about a quarter of UK prices. The MRP it seems is to stop sellers charging whatever they feel they can get away with, but as we’ll see later it doesn’t always work.
As we still need to get to our destination our driver herds us back into the car and away around the continuing set of hair-raising hairpins. The scenery continues to be breath-taking as we see the road ahead of us winding back & forth, higher and lower, round and round the sharp folds of the foothills. I read on Wikipedia that the Himalayan range was formed by the collision of the Indian sub-continent plate with the Tibetan-Asian plate, apparently at a speed of 18cm/year and with some 2500km, to-date, of that Indian plate disappearing underneath Nepal.
We reach Kempty Falls – a small village that seems to have sprung up as a tourist place around the falls and as with the Robber’s Cave yesterday, the tourists are predominately Indians – where houses cling to the steep hills on precarious looking stilts and columns. We pile out and are given an hour and a half by the driver and I now feel a fully fledged tourist as we make our way through the alley of trinket shops leading to the cable car run down to the foot of the falls. Before taking the cable car, all of about 50m, I take a leak in my first “Indian toilet” which when I think about it actually in a darn sight better shape than many British pub toilets!
Another recurring feature is what looks like makeshift temporary scaffolding but is just the way they do things here. Bamboo and other long bits of tree used to hold up flooring whilst the walls are built and the flooring concreted. It’s got to be a specialist job being able to find the right length of wood, stick it at the right angle and with the right number and sizes of bits of brick to get the floor level and, let’s not forget, be strong enough to actually hold it up? From platforms being built whilst tourists traipse over them, to domestic house building up to full scale industrial buildings. The twiglets are everywhere.
After wandering about the falls a bit I decide against walking back up, a bit more interesting though it looks, as the blister my trekking yesterday seems to have given me reminds me just to be a bit more sensible and not try & overdo everything. So back up in the cable cars and a wander around the tourist shops. When we reach them, Pete goes in search of cigarettes but not finding any decides he needs a sprite. But here they want to charge 30 rupees not the 25 I paid “which was already overpriced-the bastards” he points out.
Back in the taxi and we drive back up the hills and head back to Mussoorie ( At the start of writing this I’d thought we’d gone to the falls on the way to Mussoorie, looking at Google maps it turns out we’d driven through it on the way there! If you look at this link you’ll see the snowy mountains we saw and if you zoom in on the map, you’ll see the twists & turns I’ve been talking about – but look further along the road from Kempty falls to where it joins another road and just how much it winds back on itself! – here ). Looking out on our surroundings it makes me think, “Yeah, gotta come back here on a bike!” – the trick is getting there without having to navigate city streets! We pass the truck we’d been following when it crashed and from the opposite direction we can see it is nicely crunched into the wall. The driver is standing on the side of the road holding a broken ball joint so we give him the benefit of the doubt and presume that’s why he drove straight into the wall and not that’s what happened when he hit it, though I suspect the latter!
Arriving in Mussoorie we’re again dropped off and given a couple of hours before giving the driver a call to pick us up and we go off for a wander. There’s not really very much to do but wander about a little and take a few snaps; the Ghandi statue, the car park full of Morris Minors (it’s quite funny and quite nostalgic to see so many of this old British car on the roads here – most of them have curtains in the back windows). Rick & I dare to take a stab at some “street food” – sweetcorn that is cooked on some hot coals on the side of the road, but it looks good, tastes fresh and leaves me picking cellulose out of my teeth. A bit further up there’s a small side-stall selling shots at little balloons with an air pistol. I wanna go, I wanna go, but there’s a queue and the guys have wandered back, looking for a restaurant.
The Vegetable Jalfrezi is nice, real nice (180 rupees, about £2.50). Everyone else has gone for chicken curries of one sort or another. Alan wanted the boneless chicken whatever, but Rick insisted he didn’t want boneless he wanted bones. Make sure I get bones. He forgot to add he’d like some meat with that and so got pretty much just curried bones! But he soon cheered himself up with coffee & cake at a proper coffee shop! :)
hahaah, that's where curried bones come from ;) well well, another human being with "wolfy" nature of enjoying crunching bones- i'm not feeling so odd now :))))
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