I have had a lifelong love affair with the Himalaya. Well maybe not a lifetime but certainly it was love at first sight sixteen years ago this month. Flying into Kathmandu, our plane was full of returning Nepali and the odd tourist.
Peering at the cloudscape outside my window, I noticed a bank of clouds towering over the blanket of cotton wool clouds that we flew slightly above. To me it looked like a cloud Tsunami. But unlike real clouds, this huge frozen wave of white simply sat as still as if frozen in time.
The Nepali knew better; as everyone rushed to the side of the plane I suddenly realised that this WAS the Himalaya! My heart leapt and tears sprang to my eyes at the perfect absolute majesty of nature (and relief that my lifetime dream had been realised!)
I am not a trekking kind of person, having spent enough days earning my living in the bush as a young mum so I didn’t want to go trekking in the Himalaya; I just wanted to see them. To fill my eyes with them and be amazed at the land where only gods and yaks should trek.
Since then I have gazed at the Himalaya from many angles, lived in her valleys, sighed at her beauty and found myself at the beginning and end of them, flown over them and even trekked a little bit if lugging your groceries up them counts at all.
This season I have come to explore another pocket in the vast apron of the Himalaya foothills, a place called Almora in the Kumaon Valley.
It’s always good to travel at least once a year to somewhere you have never been before. I chose Almora simply because I hadn’t been here, didn’t know anything about it and because it was closer to where I was than Sikkim which is another place I haven’t been to yet. Googled the place in the internet and came to know about a little guest house a ten minute trek from the road which is itself another uphill trek from the town of Almora.
I contacted the guy and ended up making friends with an American woman who was writing the emails for Raju, the owner of the Guesthouse!
She greatly encouraged me to come to visit this valley where she has lived for quite a few years. I began to think that once people came to the Kumoan Valley they very rarely left which is why the place remains a little bit of a secret on the well worn tourist trail.
So here I am, looking out through the deodar pines to the valley below, being woken by birdsong in the morning and writing as if my life depended on it!
PHOTO CREDIT: INDIA MIKE