Let me begin with a very happy independence to all! This post is not for serious hikers or hard-core adventure lovers. This post is for those who like nature but are not able to spare enough time for it. Its for those who would like to do a small hike/ walk once a week or fortnight. The challenge for this creed is often to go beyond their daily walking routine. The planning or push required to go from their daily neighborhood walk to a day long excursion seems so daunting that one just keeps putting it off. This could be due to time constraints or simply after 5-6 hard days at work, one simply doesn’t have the energy to plan for the one remaining day in the week. This happens week after week, and before you know it a whole year has gone by. It is for this set of people (to which I belong as well) that I dedicate this post. I will put out a list of five hikes ( In Himachal Pradesh) which could be the first step up the ladder from the daily colony walk routine onto the larger ladder
It was a sunny November morning when I saw him for the first time. It was a Saturday so I could wake up later than usual. I trudged down the flight of wooden steps of the 1960s construction of a two storied semi attached government house where we lived. I walked into the back garden where my parents sat on a couple of cane chairs reading newspapers on holidays. As I went outside, I realised there was a third person there. He was an old Tibetan man from Dharamsala who I had met a few months ago in my grandmother’s house in Manali. His skin was wrinkled, and he looked well into his seventies. He had worked for my family sometime in the 1960s and then decided to shift to Dharamsala, as his relatives arrived slowly, one by one from Tibet. My father and the old man talked to each other animatedly, with their eyes and heads focussed on something which I could not see. As I walked towards him and my father, suddenly I saw a little white and brown puppy. It was tiny. I was told he was born t