A Serene LANSDOWNE

I am back from a new experience and I really want all of you to experience the same. Yes. I'd been to Dev Bhumi (The land of Gods) - Uttarakhand in India. My personality trait always provokes me to go to visit cold places. Hence, if I were to publish more about places, most of them would be the cold ones. So, this time along with being a cold place, my list had another criteria to be added; The "Untouched" Hills. I had jotted down, a list of places and I was really tempted to explore Uttarakhand. Blame it on my job, that I couldn't find the required number of leaves to go explore the hills completely. I was running on a tight schedule and these were the places that fit my schedule, the month of the year and of course, the "Budget". So how did I map the route to this place?

The Travel Plan

As stated earlier, I was running low on the number of leaves. So, I took a flight from Hyderabad - Delhi via Vistara (A splendid Airliner). I took the flight at 5 AM and landed in Delhi at 7AM. My stay was at the 'Optimum Palm D'Or' near the New Delhi Railway Station with complimentary Breakfast. I wouldn't recommend the hotel that much and people could rather prefer the 'Empire Delux' right opposite this one.

I took the night's Mussorie Express from Old Delhi Railway Station which left at 22:15 IST and scheduled to arrive at Kotdwar Railway Station by 06:00 IST, next morning. So we took this train on the 6th April and reached Kotdwar Railway Station. (Note: The Kotdwar Rly Station isn't very convenient for the differently abled people and there are either steep stairs / a very steep ramp which anyone could skid and fall from). So, we hired a taxi from Kotdwar Railway Station to Lansdowne (40 KMs) and there were plenty of taxis outside of the Railway Station at Kotdwar. If you'd plan to share the ride with others, TATA Maxi / Bolero charges you approx INR 100 per person. If you plan to take a premium service, i.e. the entire taxi for yourself, as we did - It costed us INR 800 for 2 people. An hour and a half of ride, was a very nice drive with very good roads. Most importantly the people are very nice and well behaved. Although there wasn't much of a scenic beauty that I could spot in the month of April, while driving to Lansdowne, the hills and the silent roads gave me a sense of peace and helped me throw out the stress I had been accumulating over months from office.