This was the end of our stay at Ghangria and we woke early since we didn’t want to miss our bus back. We hired three ghodas, loaded our bags and set off. Vidya and Liza decided to trek down and started off while I waited for another ghoda and passenger to be added. After yesterdays one ghodawala disappearing incident, we were wiser and wanted two ghodawalas. I met Shekhar on the way our when we were paying toll for the horses. Thanked him for the chocos and he seemed almost embarrassed.
The journey down seemed unending, I guess it was because we weren’t all that eager to go down as we were on the journey up. Liza hopped on to one of the spare ghodas while Vidya, after the previous day’s harrowing Hemkund trip on ghoda, decided to walk the entire stretch down to Govindghat. It began to get really hot. We passed Rana and the rest of the bus gang walking down and we knew we would be back at Govindghat earlier than the others.
By the time we reached Govindghat it was noon and the sun was scorching. We waited for Vidya on the steps of the Gurudwara and after resting a while, we set off to find the bus. We reached the parking lot, and found no GMVN bus! Some of the shopkeepers told us that there was another bus stand and I set off to look if our bus was there while Liza and Vidya waited outside a veggie shop. The bus wasn’t at the other parking lot either and I got worried.
I tried calling Rawat on his mobile which he didn’t pick up. What if the bus had gone off with our luggage and left us back? The telephone booth operator told us that the GMVN bus goes back to Joshimath and comes to pick up the people only later, and we heaved a sigh of relief. We went to one of the stalls at the parking lot to have lunch and midway, Rawat shows up. None of the other bus passengers reached until around 3 p.m. By this time, Rawat began to worry about crossing the landslide prone ghats to reach Badrinath, where we were to spend the night, before 5 p.m. when the gates would close for one way traffic.
Luck was not on our side….we left around 4, only to be stuck 20 minutes into the journey due to a landslide. We waited till 5 p.m. and turned around and went back to Joshimath. The scenery on the way back was beautiful and Vidya, sitting right at the front of the bus was busy clicking photos of the mountains, the mist and the great views.
In a way we were glad to be back at the GMVN guest house at Joshimath, we had a great room this time. And we were reintroduced to the pleasures of running water, a geyser, electricity and we made a excited fuss about just everything. After Ghangria, this hotel room was a palace. We washed up, lazed, did accounts, ordered pakoras and chai and began to relax. The food at GMVN wasn’t all that great and they took forever to serve the food….we were quite grumpy about that. We went back late at night to the room to find that Rawat had given me a missed call (this was the first of the many missed calls he gave me as I later discovered). He asked us to be ready to leave anytime after 6 a.m.
We went to sleep after that, Liza missing her nightly glass of date flavoured milk…
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