Vaishnodevi - 2

BTW, they've introduced a new way of getting to the top of the mountain -- helicopter ! For 4000/- Rs roundtrip you can take a helicopter ride up, and land pretty near the temple.

After the darshan, I had a plate of delicious rice and rajma at a place outside. Then got back to where the swamiji was co-ordinating the stuff. By then my parents had also made it safely up and they went through the darshan too. My dad was not too happy at the pony ride up and contemplating walking down but I talked him out of it and he went ahead and took the ride down again. My mom also got started going down by the doli. I spent a while there helping the swamiji with his stuff. There was one woman of our group who had not been too well the whole tour, and she had anyway come up and she looked so out of it it was quite disturbing. The swamiji helped her to go through the darshan and along with a friend she headed off to catch a horse down. Meanwhile camera-lady was also there with a friend and getting ready to head down by horse too. I realized at this point that all the walking and sleep-deprivation had finally caught up and I was pretty tired and in not too good a shape to do the trek down. So I thought I would go with them. We headed off for the pony station only to be told that there were no ponies and we would have to wait awhile. Much confusion ensued for some time with various people tried various strategies. There were a few pony minder who agreed to do the trip down 'unofficially' at a higher rate than the standard. Unofficially, because there is some system governing the pony stuff, and these people were not supposed to go down at that time. The sick woman and her friend headed off. Meanwhile camera-lady's associate was not willing to shell out the extra but she was, so she was getting somewhat upset and acerbic with him. So after some back and forth it ended up with myself and camera-lady heading down together on ponies and the other chap (and another person who had joined us) still looking around. We headed off and basically it was okay and somewhat fun, though the prospect of spending 2 hours on that pony was quite formidable. The way it works is you are riding the pony and the minder walks alongside guiding the pony and making sure things are going okay. The minder will occasionally fall behind and leave you on your own and it gets pretty scary then, because the pony negotiates the oncoming traffic including other ponies and dolies on its own, and do you trust a pony to do that ? The 2 hour odd ride down by horse and 3 hours up is actually pretty punishing. Its a combination of extremes : boredom (sitting on a pony for so long), discomfort (bouncing around as the pony negotiates all the ups and downs) and concern-to-panic (every time the pony looks like its going to bump into someone or something). In my case, add an extra twinge of guilt every now and then for riding an animal in the first place.
I was physically quite comfortable in riding the pony. There were some theoritical fundas I read somewhere at some point about how you have to 'roll' your body with the motion of the pony and not resist and it worked quite well. I was feeling quite terrible about the unethicality of riding a pony and that too breaking the rules but well, having done it no point whining. We passed a checkpost at one point where something quite strange happened. One of the minders went to the checkpost to do whatever. Some stuff ensued and then finally a guy came out, shouted at him a bit. Then he asked him to squat in front of him and actually whipped him a few times with a thin stick. I was quite horrified at the behavior, but didn't do anything. There was not that much scope to do something given that we were breaking the rules (and perhaps that was what the driver was getting punished for in the first place), and it got over very quickly. The driver took it without complaining, it seemed to be something he expected. Anyway we carried along some more when my pony started exhibiting the disturbing behavior of kind of 'tripping'. One of his front legs would buckle and then he would right himself. The driver said that this was because the path was slippery from the light showers that were going on. I was feeling more and more bad for the pony. The buckling became more and more frequent and finally it became clear that this wasn't working. So we got off (the other pony also was seeing the same problem) and walked for a while instead. While this was happening it started raining quite heavily so we had to shelter under one of the covered sections of the path. It started raining heavily and then it got to raining *very* heavily and then it kept getting worse and worse. I was transfixed by the absoulute fury, so to say, of the weather. The wind was racing. A small stream of water had formed on one side of the pathway as the water from uphill was collecting together and pouring downhill. I watched in horrified fascination as the size of this stream kept increasing and increasing. There was an electric wire (someone later told me it was a phone wire not electric) running overhead and I was having visions of this thing being brought down by the wind. The gale kept going. I started getting really concerned about all the other people from our group on the track. As I was one of the quicker ones, there must be lots of people especially older people behind us. And my parents -- I didn't know if they had made it down. What about the sick lady. She looked in pretty bad shape, imagine how she must be in this rain. She didn't look like she had a raincoat either (I had a decently warm coat that was quite waterproof). To make my mood worse, a couple of other people from the party joined us in our shelter. The lady was completely soaked she didn't have any jacket or raincoat. She didn't look in any good shape at all. Finally when the weather got slightly better she and a few others pushed ahead on the theory that they were already soaked so it was better to keep going and get to the hotel room early rather than just wait there. I felt that was a pretty bad idea as the path was really slippery so I and camera-lady stayed put. Finally maybe an hour and a half later the fury of the rain more or less ceased and we got going with an umbrella. Camera-lady had walked up which was quite an achievement as I expect she did not get a lot of exercise in her normal life. So she was getting to the end of her endurance and it was still 5 or 6 km down. We briefly considered taking the ponies but I was anxious to just push on and it was hell of lot more slippery obviously so didn't seem a good idea. So we struggled down for the remaining kilometers, one of my more miserable experiences in recent memory. It was very much a mental problem the actual walking was not so bad. But we were so keen on getting it over with and getting back to the hotel and I was so worried about all the other folks and my parents. It was getting towards 5am by this time and it was light. Towards the end of the ordeal
we see sauntering down on a pony -- my dad ! He looked in decent shape but he hadn't seen my mom. He went ahead and we soldiered along. Finally it all got over we got down, got an auto, got to the hotel and my dad and mom were both there, my mom having reached earlier. Apparently her party had been almost all the way down when the downpour started so they were able to get out quite soon after it stopped.

When I reached the hotel after getting off the auto the first person I met was the swamiji waiting outside with instructions -- "pack your bags and be ready to leave as soon as possible". (The next leg of the trip was Amritsar). It was really pissing off, I was about ready to drop dead, and he was pushing us on to the next stage. I gave him a short reply that I was more concerned about whether my parents were back.

Anyway back to the room and a shower. I was inclined towards saying 'screw it' to the tour group and staying on for some more time in Katra to recover my breath so to say. Since so many people were still on the way down, one portion of the group would start immediately and the next portion would consist of the latecomers and start later, and I was inclined to go with them. But my parents felt that since we were down and basically okay we should just push on. The next shock was seeing our suitcases which had stayed on top of the bus all night. My expensive new VIP suitcase wasn't so hot we found out -- it had let the water in, and essentially every single one of my clothes in there was completely soaked and unwearable.The only things left were a few items in a bag that we had taken into the hotel room. My parents had better luck. I was not done with just that either. I had carried my passort along with me for IDing on the flight from B'lore to Delhi. I was concerned that it might have gotten damaged so started looking for it and I couldn't find it in the suitcase. I must have left it in the hotel room at Siddhibari !! Not only that, the train tix were there with it and I couldn't find them either. I spent a *very* unpleasant few minutes after that, contemplating breaking the news to my parents and their freaking out completely, possible courses of action and telling the organizers about it and all the chaos it would cause. All this was broken when I noticed that there was a separate zippered section on the top and something was bulging out of that. A quick check and it was indeed the missing stuff. I have this unfortunate tendency to store important stuff in good, safe places and then forget where I stored it. The case here again. Anyway struggling from all this avalanche of crap and from the continuing lack of sleep we packed up, lugged the suitcases down and managed to find seats on the already crowded buses pretty much concluding the interesting and unhappy chapter of Vaishnodevi.

The swamijis didn't look too concerned about the fate of the remaining people, they left a couple of the organizers back to take care of them and headed out along with us. I was particularly concerned about one older gentleman that my dad had made acquaintance of (he was the large gentleman of the three seater in the bus journey). He absolutely wanted to take the helicopter up as he wasn't in very good shape. But the service had been suspended at that point perhaps due to weather conditions. Having come thus far, he didn't want to cop out so he took a palanquin. I saw him up on the top about the time I was leaving. He was dressed in very light clothing. So I was wondering what had happened to him, and was very relieved to see him reach the hotel just at the time that the buses were leaving. Anyway, as it turned out there were no major issues and everybody did turn up in reasonable shape without falling seriously sick. The one sick lady continued to be sick through the rest of the trip and ran into more trouble later, I think she would look on the entire tour as one of the nightmare experiences of her life.