Allegories of my life

                                           After Tungnath we left for Mana. We had not booked places to stay or counted the number of days of our travel, it was all impromptu (the kind of travel I love the most). We reached Joshimath and decided to stay at the ITBP guest house. The next morning we went to Auli to experience the chairlift ride, it was an amazing experience that offers great view of Mt. Nanda Devi and many snow covered mountains. Post the fun ride, we left for Mana after lunch. Tea time with some finger licking snacks  Mana, a place which is known to be the last village before the border of Tibet, is an antiquated little village from where one can see the change of landscape and the air. It is also believed to be the place from where the Pandavas along with Draupadi passed through before their final journey to heaven. Alongside, it is also known for the origination of river Saraswati. The flow at which the river is flowing is in most hostile form resulted Draupadi to una

I have a new travel partner (my husband) who is a travel enthusiast just like me. We decided to start off our first trek together with Chandrashila (13000 ft above sea level) in our home state, Uttarakhand.   Devprayag, where Alaknanda, Saraswati and Bhagirathi rivers meet and take the name Ganga. We drove from Haridwar quite late without knowing the actual distance to Chopta which is the base for the peak as google map showed two places named Chopta, one being closer than the other(original one) We reached Chopta (the wrong one) and realised the original place is still 70 kms away. That was the time we took a stop at Rudraprayag to understand the directions and asked the locals to help us find our destination. After much understanding, left for Rudraprayag, we crossed Agustmuni market which was still affected by the floods that came in 2013. It took us through the heart-rending episode that occurred in Uttarakhand that year and shook both of us. We stopped by Ukhimath to have tea as