Back from Yamunotri

We spent this past weekend in a little town in the Himalayas called Janki Chatti. The point of our trip was to hike up to Yamunotri, where there is a Hindu temple, and where the Yamuna river originates. Yamunotri can only be accessed by foot, and it's a 6.5 km hike from Janki Chatti. That doesn't sound like it would be too intense, but it's all uphill, and the air is really thin up there (the elevation is about 10,600 ft). We were overwhelmed by beautiful scenery everywhere we looked, even on the drive there, where I took this picture (and several others):



Something else we saw a lot of on the way...adorable Indian children!



This is a shot of the town of Janki Chatti, where our hotel was:



The town was a very cool (but very rustic...i.e. full of horse poop and flies) place, and the people there were all extremely friendly and nice. But, I have to say...even though we're used to kind of minimalistic living conditions, our hotel was pretty bad. The beds were hard as rocks, the power went out several times a day (although we're used to that), there was no hot water, and everything was damp, and consequently, smelly (including our clothes after they had been in the room overnight). Especially the bathroom. The shower was a faucet sticking out of the wall at about waist height, and the sink drain went into a tube that just dumped out onto the ground at your feet. All the water was supposed to drain into a grating in the far back corner of the room, but a lot of it didn't make it there, so the bathroom floor was just soaking wet all the time. It was kinda gross. I have a picture which I'll upload onto Flickr later, once we're done going through all of the pictures. To our hotel's credit, though, the food they made us was really good.

That said, the area was really beautiful. One of the most striking things we noticed was that the sky was actually blue, which we haven't seen since we left California - even in Mussoorie the air is a greyish blue color. On the first night there, we were supposed to stay at the hotel, but a bunch of us went with a guide who said he would take us to some hot springs. We didn't realize at the time that the hot springs were actually the hot springs all the way up at Yamunotri, where we would be hiking to the next day. So, after making it about two thirds of the way there and realizing where we were headed, we went back, since we'd be going again the next day. We did get some beautiful photos though:





And we saw some cool stuff on the way, like this giant stag beetle:



We have lots more pictures, but I haven't had time to resize and upload them all. There will be another update soon with more details from the trip, along with more photos. I also uploaded a bunch of pictures on Flickr that I didn't post here on the blog, so please check them out.