After the 4 days & nights spent in Indian railways travelling in between Nepal to Bhutan I finally arrived (a little tired) early one morning in Bhutan. Equipped with my
Quechua Arpenaz 2 Tent
(and a hell lot of supplies) I was all set to
camp and walk my way through Bhutan.
After grabbing breakfast with an Indian army man stationed in Bhutan that I met in the train, I made my way across the border.
On the other side I had to get my permits to explore the beautiful country of Bhutan, yet just as my luck would have it there had been a massive landslide the previous night and the roads (as I saw in the pictures) were utterly destroyed.
The roads would continue to be blocked for at least a week and we wouldn’t we issued our permits until the roads were fixed.
I didn’t want to spend a week waiting so I guessed that I would have to keep the idea of exploring Bhutan for a future time. I knew I would come back here again someday as Bhutan is left unfinished.
But I had made myself a promise to be off social media etc for a month but I wanted to spend that month exploring. So I decided to catch a train and I made my way to the north of India, Uttarakhand.
After arriving in Uttarakhand 3 days later, I made my way to the lake city of Nainital. I found the city way too busy and crowded for my liking. I went in a restaurant to get out of the rain and while having my breakfast I asked the waiter about a nice, quite place to camp.
On the waiters suggestions I later caught 2 local buses and walked a bit as I made my way to Sattal.
On arriving in Sattal I looked around for a good place and I set up my tent on the bank of the lake overlooking the water. As I was incredibly tired from the past week of just traveling by railways I instantly fell asleep.
A photo posted by Jeremy Noronha (@thinktravelliftgrow)
on
Aug 7, 2016 at 2:22am PDT
The next day a local shopkeeper from Jammu introduced himself and he was a traveller as well. We talked about our travels a lot and he later invited me over to his place for dinner. I spent the few days just resting, catching up on my reading, playing my Ukulele a little and exploring the neighboring areas.
The shopkeeper said that he was going to go back to Jammu for a couple of days and invited me to join him, I had never been to the state of Jammu & Kashmir so I agreed. On arriving in Jammu I was instantaneously shocked, I always perceived Jammu to be cold but on the contrary it was hot! So hot!
I spent a couple of days exploring the city of Jammu, but didn’t really want to go out much due to the heat. Realizing that due to the strikes and landslides on the highway that I wouldn’t be able to make my way to Srinagar; I decided to finally make my way to a place I always wanted to visit; Dharamsala!
All it took was a quick train ride to Patankot and then a bus ride to make my way to Dharamsala. As I arrived in the night, I didn’t see much of the city and instead just found a nice quite place to camp out and settled in for the night.
