The trip to Vaishnodevi - part-1

Its been a long time since I had gone out on tour like this…….

Aah what a trip it was…..i had never gone on a trip so very unplanned…… never had the guts to do so…..whenever I went on a tour it was chalked out to last detail. But this time it was all different. I was never sure whether I would go even half an hour before I started on the tour. Suddenly a presentation came up on the days on which we were supposed to be on tour and I was ready to drop out. But surprisingly my prof agreed to postpone the presentation for us. God factor at work.

So we were off……ahoy….we set sail…( not literally)…..but we hit the first road block. The buses were full. It was peak time. 3 days holidays , exams time had just finished and auspicious days of pournami etc had all conspired to come together and we had scores of people traveling to vaishno devi. Just when things looked bleak, we got a bus , a pretty rickety one with just the number of seats needed for us. So we were over another hurdle.

The journey was a literal pain. The bus was so very old and badly maintained that I could not get any sleep. Even as people around me were snoring away to glory, I was just sitting there lying awake exploring the possibilities of escape, just in case if the parts of the bus decided to get disentangled. But as I realized me lying awake was a boon in disguise. I would have missed such beauties of nature. As the bus winded through Haryana and Punjab, in the full moon the view of vast stretches of wheat fielded were such a scene to behold. The gentle and cool breeze hit my face, the moonlight was mesmeric and I was in love ….all over again…with nature.

But again disaster struck. The bus as I was fearing decided to give in and we had a breakdown. We were struck in village in Punjab. As people were cursing their luck I decided to look and explore around. It was a pretty stereotypical Punjabi village. But it seemed to be filled with damsels. Every girl was a pretty one and it seemed that the kind of “discovering damsels in villages” kinda stuff they show in the movies seemed to be true after all. Ah ..how I wished I had been in that Punjabi village. But as all good things come to n end, bus was put back in shape….at least that’s what the driver thought and we started on our journey again.

Soon we had entered Jammu and Kashmir. And mountains on the horizon welcomed us. Snow capped peaks in distance were really a sight to behold. But all around us were armed personnel. There were bunkers all around, a soldier was stationed at every few feet standing around shops and houses, a few were searching the fields and a lot more. But the funniest thing was how people seemed to be not minding them. Teenagers were sitting around and chatting just a little distance away from gunned men. Children were playing cricket and others were going on about their businesses. I realized whatever may happen life had to move on. And these people have learned that in a bitter way.

as i was exploring the sceneries around our bus had different ideas. it decided to break down again and this time the driver decided it was useless. he got us into a passing bus which looked like theone shahrukh took in swades. And passing through umpteen security checks we were at vaishno devi. We had reached more than 9 hours late. the bus had started at 9 pm the previous night and we reached katra, which is the footstep of vaisnodevi at 6 pm the next day.Soon we had refreshed ourselves and we were joined by our friends who had taken the train route. And we were ready to start the trek to top.