Experience

Different places have different flavors to them. There are places which are more subtle with creations of nature and humans both, these are mostly long highways through level land, best ridden through swiftly. Then there are places where nature lent a platform over which man created mesmerizing structures like forts, palaces, temples, caves and dams.

And then there are places where nature is the mammoth alive and present in varying levels of glory, with man managing to weave hamlets into its furry skin. These places are mostly in the mountains, the most wildly fluctuating of terrains out there. Roads through mountains of Uttarakhand and other states up north take us through the expanse of such mammoths, leaving us in awe, in peace, in silence on one hand and in  corners, through straights and over roughs on the other.

Myths of ghosts living in lakes and rivers, trees that speak, winds that tell the future, temples which are gateways to afterlife, sadhus who live a dozen decades and walk the world in their dreams.

You wont hear anything if you pass by too quickly, silence makes way for what Kumaon is really all about. Its reveries must be experienced with patience, under sunlight sieved through oak leaves.

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