Kempty Falls and killer street food

One of the most popular tourist destinations near Mussourie is Kempty Falls, about 15km to the northwest along a sickeningly twisty road. It’s a beautiful place, although it suffers from rather a shocking failure of development planning, with an unsightly clutter of teashops and tatty trinket stalls stretching in either direction along the road from the Falls. After a few little rapids and mini-falls upstream, the river empties itself down a rock face into a natural pool, full of Indian tourists from Delhi cavorting in the chilly water. The area was first developed in about 1835 by a British army officer named John Mekinan. The name Kempty probably derives from “camp-tea”, as the Brits during colonial rule would organize their tea parties here.




















One major up-side of Kempty Falls –awesome street food! I patronized a grilled-corn saleswoman, as well as a dude with a pretty basket of goodies, including chickpeas, onion, tomato, salt and lime, which he mixed up with a few deft pinches and swirls. The result: a delicious bowl of spicy, crunchy masala goodness.







The next day back at the language school, in halting Hindi I told my professor about our visit to Kempty Falls. After a funny look and a snort of contempt, he told me how that particular tourist trap was only for people from Delhi, and that Mussourie-dwellers would never be caught dead there. In the summer, Delhi is a sweaty hell-hole, and a well-known escape from the heat is to Kempty Falls. Jump in your car at 5:00am and by 11 you can be at the Falls. My professor painted a very vivid picture of Delhi-ites, oppressed by the heat of the plains, very nearly loosing their minds in childish joy upon immersion in the frigid pool at the base of the Falls. The good people of Mussourie, however, having access to pleasant weather and cool water year round, feel they have no need to visit such a tourist trap.

Village Life

More than 70% of India’s 1.2 billion people live in rural areas, which is fairly remarkable for a country with such booming and expanding cities. A recent hike took me to another small village, similar to Agorga, which was described in my last post. We reached this nameless village after a short taxi ride along the road in the direction of Tehri, and then a brisk 2-hour hike down a steep path off the side; down, down through a thick forest to the valley bottom. There on the banks of the river we found ourselves in a little village of perhaps 50 houses. A number of school children, roaming about on their way home for lunch, had great fun giggling about our hilarious Hindi pronunciation. Although they look rather serious in this picture!




















I must have had food on the brain, because for some reason most of my pictures from the day focus on the various products from the fields laying out on doorsteps drying in the sun. Colorful collections of beans (for dal) and bright red chili peppers (“mirch” in Hindi) caught the sun and my eye.

Assi Ganga River Valley trip

Mussourie is wonderful, but sometimes it’s nice to get away. Last weekend all the Fulbright Fellows in Mussourie plus some friends from the language school took a trip to the Assi Ganga river valley, near the town of Uttarkashi to the east of Mussourie, just 20-30 kilometers from the border with Tibet. We set off around 2pm and finally arrived in the dark about 11 hours later. You may be interested to know that according to Google Maps, this same trip should take 2.5 hours. Yeah right. Much of the road we traversed was impassable just days before, due to avalanches during the last blast of the monsoon. In many places the road was covered with packed dirt and rocks – avalanche residue packed down by the lorries that ply these roads – and the protective barrier dividing the road from the cliff was missing or hanging crazily out into space. About 6 hours into the drive one car in our three vehicle convoy bashed its bottom on some rutted road and from thence forth could not shift out of 1st gear. But having suffered crowded cars, flat tires, and transmission difficulties, we were finally greeted at the Kuflon Basics guest house with a hot meal and comfortable beds!

Over the next several days we swam in the river, enjoyed the views and good company, and hiked up to the nearby village of Agora, on the trekking route to Dodi Tal (Trout Lake, a popular trekking destination). Agora village is one of the sites of the Lighting a Billion Lives Campaign (LaBL), an initiative of TERI, my institutional affiliation in India. The objective is to provide solar lanterns to rural communities all over India, to provide light at night where there is none, and to replace inefficient and polluting kerosene lanterns in villages that use them. Agora has already benefited from some government development projects, thanks to its prominent location on the trekking route to Dodi Tal. About a third of the 100-ish households in the village have either newly installed toilets or solar lighting systems. Along the way we were amazed by field after field of amaranth, a grain plant with bright red tassels. Whole hillsides were bathed in red.


Our guides in our weekend adventure were three recent graduates of Yale University who are now in India running a start-up fly fishing guiding business, Baobab Educational Adventures. In addition to showing American and European sportsmen some world-class fly fishing locations, these three are working to establish sustainable environmental tourism in the Assi Ganga valley that benefits the local people, as well as working with local institutions and stakeholders to conserve the river and valley environment. The Assi Ganga is a holy river, and one of several rivers that converge to eventually become the Ganges. The Ganges is very polluted along much of its length, and these few-remaining healthy headwaters are now coming under pressure from dam building and unsustainable fishing. Baobab Educational Adventures is one of many small ventures working to maintain a healthy river ecosystem while providing economic opportunity to local people.

Where I am

Landour, my current location, is a high-altitude suburb of Mussourie, a town of a little less than 30,000 people perched in the Himalayan foothills at an elevation of 6,000ft. Dehradun, the state capital of Uttarakhand State, is about 30 km away, although it takes the better part of 2 hours to get there due to the winding roads and precipitous contours of this landscape. The hillsides surrounding Mussourie are heavily forested with mixed pine, rhododendron, and oak forests.

Known as the “Queen of the Hills” to the British Raj, Mussourie was a popular retreat from the summer heat of the plains for the British. During the 19th century, the Mall (the local equivalent of Main Street) reportedly sported signs saying things like “Indians and Dogs Not Allowed”.

Middle class Indians now come to Mussourie in droves during the hot season. The west end of the Mall is popular with honeymooning Indian couples. In contrast, the east end, where Mussourie ends and Landour begins, supports a conspicuously large population of videshi, aka white foreigners, studying Hindi at the Landour Language School.

Mussourie is an affluent place, with much higher literacy rates than the average in India (86% compared to 60% overall). Several important institutions and schools were originally founded to serve the families of British army and government officials, and now cater to Indian students. One notable example is the Woodstock School, a Christian, international residential school founded in the 1850’s. This week the Woodstock School hosted something called the Mountain Writer’s Festival – I mooched in on a couple of poetry readings and musical performances – my primary motivation may or may not have been to get a free cup of tea.

Mussourie is a beautiful, but like most of India, suffers from its own share of environmental ills. The town’s booming popularity as a tourist destination has led to over-development. Garbage collection and water scarcity are also perennial problems. A number of beautiful views around Landour are marred by rivers of garbage statically flowing down ravines.

Mumbai

It’s nice to have an international businesswoman for a sister. The other week, said sister traveled to Mumbai for a week of meetings, providing a perfect excuse for me to visit the megacity (and the sister). A local friend much increased our enjoyment of the city, showing us the sites and protecting us from unscrupulous henna saleswomen on Chowpatty beach. In our few days of tourism we visited the Gateway to India, various shopping districts and hotspots, and stuck our heads into the Taj Palace Hotel, one of the sites of the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks. What a beautiful hotel! In the bathroom an attendant lady in a grey sari helped me wash my hands (a little weird but why not) and in the courtyard pool a very polite but very firm security guard suggested we should return the way we came.

Mumbai is a massive city, population over 14 million at last census. One thing that struck me as I rode in taxies around the city was the number of street-sleepers – people who at dark just spread a bit of sheet or cardboard wherever they are on the street or doorway and go to sleep. Mumbai has a major lack of affordable housing, and the people drawn to the city from rural areas in search of jobs often have no choice but to sleep wherever they can in proximity to their jobs. The work done by these street-sleepers is mostly menial and temporary, yet still represent greater opportunity than can be found in the villages from where they came.

Monkey menace

Upon my arrival in Mussourie, riding up the hill for the first time in a taxi, I was very excited to see a little brown monkey sitting on a wall on the side of the road. Over the next few days, I saw many more, both the brownish rhesus macaque (Macaca mulatta), and the slightly larger grey langur monkey (Semnopithecus dussumieri). Handsome beasts they are, but my initial excitement has given way to some annoyance and trepidation. They are not at all afraid of people or vehicles, and can be quite aggressive if they see food, as I discovered as I made the elementary monkey mistake of walking out of my house with a sandwich in my hand one morning. A few days later, I looked up from my morning chai in time to see a macaque dashing out the front door with a loaf of bread from the kitchen in its hand. Although I give them a wide berth these days, they are endlessly entertaining to watch!

Landour Language School

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It’s been about three weeks since I arrived in Mussourie, in Uttarakhand State. I’ve been studying Hindi at the Landour Language School, an almost-100 year old institution housed in a church and old monastery complex. This is just about the busiest time of the year for the school; about 50-60 students of all different nationalities are to learn Hindi for a whole variety of reasons, from personal interest, to study abroad programs, to professional development. The classes are fairly intense – one-on-one for four, one hour sessions a day. That combined with 3-4 hours of homework and self-study makes for a decently full workday

Life up here in the cloud bank is persistently misty and rainy. September is the tail-end of the monsoon, but locals claim that this year’s monsoon is lasting weeks longer than usual. This week much of Uttarakhand State has been plagued by flooding and landslides. Many locals I've talked to claim that this is the longest and most intense monsoon in recent memory, and have cited climate change. Anecdotal evidence of climate change in action.