The trip to the valley of flowers was on…till 1:30 am Friday, Oct 2, 2009.
I, Bhushan and his wife went to the last show of the movie “WANTED” on Thursday night. After the movie…when we were walking in parking area…they said that they would like to join me on my trip to the valley of flowers. “WANTED” did bring me some good company. It was a three days weekend…still not enough for valley of flowers. Oh…did I tell you that I was on vacation (full two weeks...)
Plan changed…we decided to go to Landsdowne…small hill station in Garhwal. When I say small…very-very small. I heard about it from a colleague of mine.
Made some notes of the route…4:00 AM, Oct 2…loaded Bhushan’s car and…off to Landsdowne. We took the Gurgaon-Delhi-Meerut-Bijnor-Najibabad-Landsdowne route.
In a long-long while…I saw the rising sun. Yes…it was looking good. The roads in the morning were not very busy kinds…there were sugarcane farms on both sides of the road…dew drops on the leaves…looked amazing…We halted for a couple of minutes for some clicks.
What’s a trip without any unintended detouring . We halted at a place called “Monty Millions” for breakfast. Post which, we continued on the same route for around 30 KMs only to realize that we should have taken a right turn exactly from Monty Millions. OOOps…we came back (another 30 KMs) and took the correct route...this time to Landsdowne.
The flora and fauna started to change as we were going up in the mountains. From sugarcane farms…mango trees…it almost transformed into series and parallels of Pines and Chids…very picturisque. We took another halt near a water body…went downhill…and next thing I remember was...all three of us in water…we finished it with a quick photo shoot and were back on track.
There we were…we reached our destination…Landsdowne…To our surprise, it was an army base…after inquiring about the tourist attractions in and around, we got our ‘to visit’ list…
We thought everything is on track and as per the plan…the next to do was to get a hotel. Landsdowne is a very-very small hill station with only a couple of hotels. I saw the last room getting booked in front of me…The place was not too crowded but we were told that many visitors had to go back because of no rooms…OMG!
Some told us to check up hill…I along with Hima (Bhushan’s wife) went to check the availability of any rooms there. We met the owner…he said that some one just called up for a room and would be there any moment …we waited…a guy came but said no to the price. We thought we just got lucky!
We were back to square one when the owner said that the person who had made the call is yet to come. Hima somehow pushed the owner to give away the LAST ROOM IN LADSDOWNE to us. Yes, the LAST ROOM! We actually saw people going back. It was as if the room was just waiting for us to come…It was a two plus one bed cottage…perfect for us. We took a quick round around the place…and then retired, leaving everything for the next day…
I recommend going to Lansdowne only with prior booking. Good place to be…cool calm and quiet.
Best time to visit: Post monsoon (after July/August) till April/May
Recommended mode of travel from NCR: On road
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