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.