We and our off the wall reasons to visit Uttarakhand

Hey there, hope you are doing good. After the post on a solo trip (with kids) to Channapatna, here I come, with a series of posts related to my family vacation to Uttarakhand, the land of cosmic mountains, breathtaking landscapes, thrilling adventures, holy places, yoga, and wellness. 

Let's begin our conversation with a question. How do you usually pick a holiday destination? For a long weekend, you must be going for the places already known to you or new places suggested by your friends or Google baba. If you have a little longer holidays, you must either be visiting famous tourist places like Maldives (the new celebrity destination), Singapore, Bali, and so on! If you have a specific purpose in your mind, like trekking or pilgrimage or adventure, you must be looking for places that fulfill the same. What was our reason for plumping for Uttarakhand? The answer is 'none of the above'. We wanted to visit Uttarakhand for some of the really unusual reasons. Curious? Do read on.

The first reason was literature by famous author Ruskin Bond. Through his short stories, novels and children's books, Mr. Ruskin Bond paints very vibrant and vivid paintings of the people and the landscapes of places like Dehradun, Kausani and Mussourie on the canvas of our hearts. I always wished to experience them first hand.

The other reason was food. Our kid had to study the Uttarakhand cuisine last year as a part of a subject enrichment activity. The dishes looked so tempting that they made us crave for the Uttarakhand food. 

The last reason is the subject of geography. Hard to believe? It is, but yes, you read it right! Me as a child always found geography very boring. The geography text book would be full of humdrum details of various places which I used to mug up just to clear exams with decent grades. But as I started reading more and more, my perspective changed. I slowly started understanding how geography impacts us. I started appreciating the geographical phenomena shaping different terrains into the way they are. I started admiring the mountains, the rivers, the oceans and many other natural bodies. How amazing it would have been to learn geography in a way that creates curiosity in one's mind to know more about the world? The world that we are so much a part of! When geography was first introduced to my daughter, I really wanted to give it a try to guide her in understanding different aspects of it pragmatically. I wanted her to learn to read between the lines so that they made more sense. Hence we started exploring the geographic lessons together. We started to see the real pictures and the videos of the things described in the book. We tried to simulate some of the geographical phenomena using a variety of things present at home. 

One of the lessons in her textbook described the Himalayan ranges. It briefly mentioned their relative heights and the impact of the same on the weather and eventually on the type of flora and fauna. I greatly enjoyed understanding it again, this time in a more pragmatic way. Although the images and videos available on the web gave us a good idea about the ranges, the thought of experiencing the same seemed quite exciting. 

'Once a year, go to some place you've never been before', says His Holiness Dalai Lama.

Staying in Bangalore for a long time now, having explored many places in Southern India, we wanted to start exploring Northern India. Consequently, when the long Dusshehra holidays gave us an opportunity to plan a vacation, the first thing I googled for was 'best time to visit Uttarakhand'! Dusshehra holidays which were starting in the month of October, were falling in one of the best periods and knowing the same made me jump for joy.

People visit Uttarakhand usually for pilgrimage or trekking-adventure or yoga-wellness. There are plenty of travel packages catering to each of the purposes. But considering our offbeat reasons for visiting Uttarakhand, it was obvious that no travel package was going to fit our purpose. Ergo, we started planning our own itinerary.  With so many attractive places to choose from, Dusshehra holidays started looking quite short. It was really tough to handpick the places for our itinerary. So, how did we manage to finalize the same? Let's talk about it in the next post. That said, let me conclude this post with a quote from famous author, environmental philosopher, botanist and zoologist John Muir.

The mountains are calling and I must go...