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.

From Alaska to India

Locals often claim that Kaktovik is the foggiest place on earth. In the little room that serves as an office for the local airline, some witty fellow has scratched "Barter Island" off the map on the wall and replaced it with "Foggy Island". I believe it. For 5 days the coast was gray and totally socked in, with visibility less than a couple hundred meters; not good conditions to land a small plane on a gravel spit runway. So I fretted in the bunkhouse, getting ever more irritable as my window for reaching India on time narrowed (check out the foggy bunkhouse in the picture). The fog finally cleared on Friday, and when I reached Fairbanks, US Airways told me that if I wanted to get back to Virginia without spending $1400, then I would have to wait until Monday.

So no orientation for me. However I did get to spend an extra couple of days with my parents in Virginia. I finally got to New Delhi on Wednesday night, a full 8 days after my originally scheduled arrival time. After a few days engaged in paperwork and a mini-orientation, I jumped on a plane up to Dehra Dun, the capital of Uttarrakhand state. From there a taxi took me up, up, up into a cloud, to the town of Mussourie, a British-Raj era hill station, where I will be studying Hindi at the Landour Language School for the next three months. After 2 days here, I've concluded that Mussourie is perpetually encased in a cloud. Walking through the busy town center, the blare of horns and chatter of honeymooning couples is muffled by the dense fog hanging between the buildings. Occasionally there's an opening in the white bank, and glorious views down the hillsides are visible. Dense trees cover the slopes, and gray languor monkeys and a whole variety of unidentified birds fill the branches. Rhesus macaques sit on walls along the roads, staring balefully at passersby, hoping to spy some food to snatch. I'll upload some photos as soon as I take some! Classes start tomorrow!

Season wrap-up

I'm currently back in Kaktovik, my season of Alaskan field work wrapped up, and waiting for the fog to lift so I can get back to Fairbanks. The daily flight from Kaktovik to Fairbanks has been canceled for the last two days in a row due to poor visibility. I'm really hoping tomorrow will be clearer; as it is I will have only 1.5 days back in Virginia to repack before flying to India! If I get delayed another day, things are going to get ugly...

My last few weeks at the Jago delta camp were great - we had good weather and got lots done. The short arctic summer is drawing to a close, and the sun set for the first time a few days ago. Now we get prolonged and spectacular sunsets each evening around 11pm (look at my last post for a photo).



We've had some adventures with our boat, I've learned a lot about shorebirds and mudflat invertebrates, and on my last day in the field I finally got my greatest wish and saw a polar bear! We were out in the boat surveying the barrier islands just offshore looking for a good place to catch birds when what we thought was a chunk of white driftwood suddenly turned into a bear. We were in the boat at the time, so it wasn't as scary as it would have been had we been wandering around the island on foot! It was a young male, maybe 4-6 years old, and was curious about us, standing up on his hind legs for a better look. We kept a respectful distance to avoid bothering it, but I was able to get some good pictures with my new camera. What an amazing beastie! Now I'm content and can leave the Arctic happy. It would have been a huge disappointment to go without seeing one.






Later that same day, we celebrated the polar bear, someone's birthday, and my departure by jumping in the Arctic ocean. A little chilly, but totally fun!