Mussoorie Diaries...

Travel is about so much more than the momentary thrills, innumerable pictures and social media posts. It creates memories which bring a smile every time you think about an experience or a place. Memories, of which you will fondly talk about for years to come, to someone generations ahead of you.. could be a boat ride in the pitch dark of the twilight hours, a cup of warm yak milk in biting cold, a kind stranger on an arduous trail…or a pretty lady in an obscure village with green eyes. . . Memories that may still give you the goose bumps… that time when you missed the last bus to your next destination…. or when you misplaced your wallet somewhere, only to realise it later.. and went running to all those places again with your newly made travel friends to try your luck…to no avail and eventually went broke!

This is about my trip way back in 2013 to Mussoorie in Uttarakhand, India. Mussoorie is rightly called the queen of hills and is surrounded by the mighty Shiwalik ranges. Like Shimla, back in the days of the Raj, the British used to take shelter in Mussoorie during the warm tropical months in other parts of India. Mussoorie is that perfect place, of which you can take photos and make personalised holiday postcards … Take a look at these photos! All these were taken from a very low end phone camera.

An evening drive up from the base, Dehradun (capital city of the Uttarakhand state) to Mussoorie with the curves and bends makes a lovely picture… with the sky changing its colour every five minutes… bright blue, bright red, ink blue with a stripe of yellow and orange.

For a person living in a city like Mumbai with its incessant hustle-bustle, towering buildings and the countless people that wander its streets and train stations with a jostle … a push here.. . a shove there, Mussoorie is that envious small town where everybody knows each other, there are post-work sit-down meet-ups in a small café, bungalows with tall trees and big lawns which remind you of ghost movies, where probably you don’t need google maps to find someone’s home….. “oh its straight ahead from mall road … the red bricked house … the one with two lamp posts on each side”…

Mussoorie has a couple of go-to spots like a typical Indian hill station which can be covered in a day or two. Mussoorie usually forms part of a mandatory two-day relaxing stop-over for people visiting Rishikesh and Haridwar . When in Mussoorie, you can just soak in the views of the mighty mountains from practically everywhere and just relax in a small cafés, relish the momos and maggi off the street corner, go on long walks on roads that lead nowhere, and just be by yourself in the silence of the mountains. .. no places to tick off.. no agenda.