Road Trip To The Mountains

Well, to the foothills actually...

The road to Nainital heads east out of Delhi up into hill country, the foothills of the Himalayas. Sounds romantic and exotic right? First you have to pass through Uttar Pradesh which is undoubtedly one of the filthiest places I've ever seen and I've spent a lot of time in New Jersey.

It's quite depressing actually. Poverty, dust and dirt are one thing but acres of garbage, garbage lining the roadside, garbage piles next to the marketplaces, garbage piles spilling over into the ponds, rivers and canals - it's like people just dump their garbage everywhere. Doesn't anyone care? It's really a shame because UP is home to the Taj Mahal and Varanasi among other sites and it's considered the cradle of Indian civilization.

We stopped at a roadside restaurant (Classic Chicken Point where we got some tea but you could also order "butter tost with jaim" for 20 rupees) then hit the road again wondering why the traffic was so heavy.

Something was definitely going on and a lot of people were headed for it. It turns out we were driving into Garmukteshwar on the last day of the Ganga Dusshera Festival, a 10-day long festival devoted to the worship of holy river Ganga where devotees flock to numerous ghats located on the west bank of the river Ganga to bathe in water and carry the river clay home to venerate (thank you Google search). As we crossed the bridge over the Ganges (the first time I was seeing the Ganges River!) we could see hundreds if not thousands of people in the river and on the shores - quite an impressive sight!

On our way back to Delhi we drove across the same bridge at night and I could see large fires burning along the riverbanks. I asked Brahm Datt (being a pandit, he's my go-to guy for questions regarding all things Hindu) if they were funeral pyres but he said cremation isn't supposed to take place at night. But what if the fire was started during the day and it's not done burning everything up completely by the time it gets dark???

They have the craziest looking taxi/trucks in UP! Maybe they go over the top decorating their vehicles to compensate for the bleak, garbage-filled scenery that blights the landscape in so many places?