Saturday, January 29, 2011

Directly from the foot of the Himalaya

For all of you reading the blog much for the skiing part, well you can skip this one since for the first time, there isn't no even a single skiing pictures!

We finally made it to Gulmarg yesterday evening where we are to stay for the next 3 weeks.

After spending three incredible weeks to Japan, I flew back to Montreal where I spent 53 hours before catching my plane to go to Delhi. The 4.3cm of snow on the ground and the temperature threatening to plunge under the -30 degrees didn't give me any temptation to stay there much longer!

After celebrating my brother birthday and trying to catch up a bit on laundry, I jumped on the plane with my Dad for a nice 16 hours journey!
We decided to stay in Delhi for 2 days to walked around and to get a taste of that buzzing city! We landed at midnight local time and I was quite glad my Dad had previously arranged a taxi to our hotel since I felt quite mentally slow to face the massive crowd of touts and corrupt taxi driver waiting for us at the airport!

We spend our first day mostly walking around town in the Old Delhi part.
We used the metro to move around town and it worked great! Being just before their national holiday, a lot of the official places where closed leaving us a much smaller list of things to do. We walked around Chadni Chowk which used to be the main street of Delhi which is now an unstructured and diverse market. 
This rather smelly and poor part of Delhi offered some scenery not for the fainted hearts!
 
On India's 62 years of independence, we went to visit the much nicer and modern part of Delhi which was used as the central place of the celebration.
 
After some more sightseeing, we were done and went back to our hotel and buy our plane tickets for the following day to go to Srinagar.

Srinagar (pronouncing Chrinagar) is the capital of Kashmir. After a flight of about an hour, we landed to a rather unsnowy place. From the airport, we caught a taxi to go to Gulmarg. You don't have to worry about not being able to get a ride! About 30 drivers are waiting for your just outside of the airport. The price is fixed at 1400 roupies (30$) and off we were!
We didn't had eyes big enough to see and to capture everything that was going on!
 
Sitting in the taxi, we were just stunned by the daily life of the Kashmiri. 
The road really started to climb after a while and the snowbanks moved from nothing to…. almost nothing! The hard crust laying on top of about 25-40cm of snow on the ground doesn't impress me that much!
After an hour or so of driving, we finally arrived in Gulmarg. We booked a night for two days at our arrival at The Pine Palace. We will walked around town to see the hotels and the price as a lot of rooms are empty due to the really bad snow year.
The snowbanks aren't any impressive and the forecast isn't too promising either… I guess it's your turn to send me out some tits deep powder shots and tease me about how I should be at your skiing spot!!
Looking forward to strap my skis in the coming days!
evans

3 comments:

Babiche said...

Criss! Du Jim Beam pis du Oban... c'est la grosse vie sale!!! Le Oban c'était mon scotch préféré en Écosse!! J'vous souhaite de la neige!!

Terophoto said...

T'aurais dû rester à Niseko!
http://www.snowjapan.com/e/daily/niseko-now.php

www.FrancoisBergeron.com said...

Salut Evans, merci pour la suggestion de Rogers Pass, la neige était vraiment incroyable. Je vous souhaite plein de grosse tempête de neige. Salut