kedarnath, my first ride up

i was already late for my train.

i don’t mean a little late. i mean the kind of late where you’ve already made peace with missing it. but it was the same train i’d actually booked, so i ran for it anyway and hoped. those who know, know how i somehow reached the platform. and the train was still there, waiting, like it had been holding the door for me.

and the strange part is i wasn’t even heading somewhere obvious. i was going to sonipat.

the friend, and the bike

there was a friend there. we’d met online during covid, of all things, playing pokémon through the long empty months when the world had stopped and a screen was the only place you could meet anyone. this whole trip was his idea. he’d bought a splendor for it, brand new, paid for with money he’d earned himself, and he was so proud of that bike you could see it on his face.

his family was not as thrilled. he spent that whole night arguing them down, fighting off everyone’s worry one by one, till it got late and they finally, reluctantly, let it go.

next morning we didn’t ask again. we packed our bags and sneaked out around 5:30AM, two of us on one new bike, the dark still lifting off the highway as we got onto the haridwar road.

one day of road

it was all one day. we left before sunrise and didn’t stop properly until the dormitory that night.

we reached haridwar by 10:30, borrowed a hotel’s washroom without staying, didn’t stop for anything more, and pushed straight on into the hills. rishikesh came and went, and after that the road took up the river and didn’t let go, following the alaknanda through devprayag and srinagar down to rudraprayag, where we left the main line and turned up the mandakini valley toward agastyamuni, kund, and guptkashi. the names came and passed in a blur, hour after hour, the day draining out of the sky around us.

by night my legs had locked up and gone frozen on the footrests, and i couldn’t feel them anymore. the road from guptkashi to sonprayag turned to mud and the bike kept slipping under us, in the dark, in traffic that didn’t thin out the way mountain traffic is supposed to. it is a stretch i won’t forget.

we made it to sonprayag and parked the bike. then came the small, unglamorous problem of where to sleep. we found a dormitory, one long hall with maybe forty to sixty people laid out across the floor, one blanket each, everyone breathing in the same cold air. we took our spot and slept.

the climb from gaurikund

morning, 7 o’clock. before anything else there was the line for the washroom, common to everyone in that hall, and somehow between the queue and brushing and getting our bags together we managed the whole thing in thirty minutes. then we followed where everyone was heading. a taxi service was running people up to gaurikund for fifty rupees, so we took it, and from gaurikund the walk begins.

gaurikund has a hot spring where travellers bathe, and stalls with emergency supplies for the climb above, because what comes next is not easy. twenty-two kilometres, one way, going up.

five kilometres in, my body went into shock. i had nothing left, no energy to climb, and i still had most of the mountain ahead of me. the people i’d made friends with at the start had vanished somewhere and i couldn’t find them. it was heating up, so i pulled off my jacket and stuffed it in my bag, and then i saw a lemonade stand a little way off. i don’t know what that man put in it. but i drank it and something switched back on in me, and i climbed ten more kilometres on it.

then the hunger came. up here almost no supplies make it, so you take what there is, and gratefully. i asked for a roti and a maggi. i know it’s a strange combination. it works. i kept saying the same thing to myself the whole way up, that i just need to keep walking, that’s all, just keep walking.

an old woman, eighty-plus, went past me without a stick. and i thought, if she can do this, what excuse do the rest of us have.

what the mountain showed me

not everything up there was kind to look at.

horses and mules had died along the path, worked until they dropped, cloth tied over their heads, left to rot where they fell. some had been thrown off into the valley once they were no longer useful. and people kept adding their garbage to the trail like the mountain owed them somewhere to put it. zero civic sense. i picked up what i could as i walked, trying to undo a little of it, but you can only carry so much.

the sun was going down on the side i was climbing and the cold was coming in fast. then it started to rain. i had my raincoat handy, found shelter for a second, got it on, and kept going. and then the rain turned to hail. the animals were out in the open through all of it while we had shelter to duck into. what kind of journey is this, i kept thinking, that has no empathy in it. i still don’t understand it. i climbed anyway.

i stopped to wait at a checkpoint, because by now my mates were a full hour behind me. that’s the whole secret of it, really, slow and steady and never stopping. consistent walking gets you further than bursts of effort ever will. the streams of clear water coming down the mountain the whole way up are almost unbearably tempting.

ritesh finally caught up to me there, and from that point we went on together.

the basecamp, and a cold that doesn’t let you sleep

we reached the basecamp and booked a tent that fit our budget, dropped the bags, and went straight to the temple. we got lucky, the evening shayan aarti was happening as we walked in, and we watched it before heading back.

there was another family sharing the tent with us. we had sleeping bags, but sleeping bags mean nothing at minus five, minus ten, with storm winds pulling at the canvas all night. i layered on every piece of clothing i had in my bag and finally fell asleep around 5AM, and got maybe three hours.

the moment i stepped out of the tent, a helicopter went past on my left. and that was when i realised our tent was pitched right on the edge of the valley, because where the helicopter was heading, the whole kedarnath range opened up in front of me, snow-covered, enormous, lit up in the morning. one of my first mornings like this, at this altitude, with that in view.

right there in front of me an uncle stepped onto a patch of black ice and the morning handed me its one piece of comedy. he was walking forward, arms going, fully committed, and going absolutely nowhere, legs running in place like a tom and jerry petroleum-slick scene come to life. i couldn’t help laughing. the mountain takes everything from you and then, once in a while, just to keep things even, it gives you that.

the bath, the line, the blackout

i found another of our group ahead, shopping, and we got into the darshan line, which was already long. and somewhere in there i thought, why not have a dip in the mandakini.

it was around nine, the sun was up, and i told myself the sun would take care of me. so i went down alone. found a bucket i could use and poured the river over myself, and the water had ice crystals still floating in it. it froze me solid and woke up every single nerve in my brain at once. i changed into fresh clothes and went back to the line a different person.

nine hours in that queue. but i got a good darshan for it. even there, hands came out asking for money, for the darshan, for the prasad being served, and i gave what i had and came out, and the temple closed its gates behind me.

and then i started blacking out. stupid, really. i hadn’t drunk any water at this altitude, assuming i was fine, and i wasn’t. i got some medicine from one of their camps and steadied myself, and then i started walking up again, toward the bhairavnath temple above the main shrine.

that’s when it began to snow. my first snowfall. there’s something different about this place, something i can’t quite put into words. i got the darshan at bhairavnath and felt a little more like myself.

the walk down, and the stranger who wasn’t one

last day, the ritual done, and the best sunset i think i’ve ever seen waiting for me as i started down.

because it got dark, i fell in with an uncle on the path. he told me how he’d done the trek in half my time, by catching hold of the horses’ tails one after another and letting them pull him up the steep stretches. army man. he was training his kid to run every day alongside his bike. the whole valley had gone dark by then and the stars were out everywhere, more than i’d ever seen, and it was something else entirely. he told me not to drink the spring water, to drink from the taps instead, it’s cleaner. we walked the whole way down talking and it never once felt like talking to a stranger.

gaurikund, a flock of sheep, and a roof we didn’t book

at gaurikund we got into a taxi, and then sat through a whole hour of it because someone had let their sheep out across the road and there was simply no way through. we were finished, completely tired, and now there was the other thing, everything was booked and we had nowhere to stay.

we found a restaurant willing to give us shelter for the night. and the view from it the next morning was worth the whole mess, because the place sat up high and the valley fell away below it.

then back down to the parking. on the way we crossed a water snake, and noticed dhari devi, the protector of uttarakhand, watching over the road, so we stopped there too before riding on.

a little further down we stopped at devprayag, where the alaknanda and the bhagirathi run into each other and the river first takes the name ganga. you can stand at the sangam and watch the two different-coloured waters fold into one. a quiet last stop, the kind that lets a trip settle a little before it’s over.

home

then delhi, non-stop.

my legs were dead, my back was killing me, and by the end the only thing left in my head was reaching home. i pulled into delhi on the afternoon of the 19th of october.

the whole thing was jugaad from the first hour to the last. the bike was my friend’s, brand new, paid off with his own earnings. the camera hanging around my neck the whole climb i’d borrowed from the company i was working for at the time, and i kept it and used it for a long while after, until i handed it back when i eventually resigned. my entire share of the trip came to about six thousand rupees. you don’t need much for something like this. you need the nerve to leave.

it was my first ride. four hundred kilometres there and back, a borrowed dream of a bike, a mountain that took everything and handed some of it back changed. i didn’t come down the same.