Kasmanda Lodge Mussoorie

... hired 3 men and 2 mules just to take us on the hike. They cooked 5 course meals and brought tea and hot water for bathing to our tent each morning. The guide (Kooldeep) got hammered each night on home brews and serenaded us with songs by Scorpion and Bob Marley. One of the mule guides (Gumpty) had a really high pitched voice and would sing and yell and it cracked us up. There is a group photo. Brad was a little ...

... dialogue" in Hindi then you are supposed to figure out what grammer lessons they are trying to teach you. So there are no charts or simple rules for Hindi. But this little phrase book has it all! So I just wanted to add a note to say thank you again Jeannie for the book, it has proven very useful! Also, here are some photos of me in my shirts! I'm going to go get more today. Sorry, no other pictures, we haven't been going many places lately, just studying.

... them here they sparked and died.) Our week here in Mussoorie has been spent mostly going to school and studying. Our days go something like this. We wake around 7. Have breakfast around 7:30 (usually toast with peanut butter, chai, and porridge). School starts at 8:20. They divided us up in to groups of 6 and we have four classes that are about 50 minutes each. This way we get to switch teachers and have little breaks. From 10-10:30 we have a break ...

... was that. I didn't buy any maps because I didn't have any money on me. I was the only grad student that went today, but I didn't even notice till later because I get along with the undergrads so well. Dr. Gamkhar arrived today. Tibetan Cultural Center This was an odd little jaunt after the Survey of India. A Buddhist temple with a lot of ...

... we gladly moved in for the night. Next day we cleared the pass (10,600 ft or so) - after 5km more pushing at a "mere" 350 ft/km. And then dropped at the same gradient for 7km, stopping frequently to let our brakes cool. Gretchen's "trick tire" went flat. again. It has done this a couple times now and I've never found the leak, so gave up and used the second-to-last spare inner tube. The descent dropped us into the Lahoul Valley, the lush, green valley which runs to the border ...

... shopkeepers and people on the street speak English, a luxury that we all really appreciate. It's hard to force yourself to practice Hindi, however, when you're not surrounded by it all the time. When one gets frustrated at a miscommunication it's easy to forget that this is not most people's first language and there's no way that we could speak Hindi at this point as well as most can speak English. Last weekend, however, was a bit different. We ...

... by a man I suspected to be her dad...she was definitely one brave kid! Where I parked myself just happened to be where all the truck-floats turned the corner, so I had to constantly smoosh myself up against the wall to make sure that my feet wouldn't get run over or trampled by the crowd trying to squeeze through the narrow space between the stores and the trucks. At one point, a tiny Tibetan woman with an adorable baby bundled on her back stopped in front of ...

... aka Ganges) together. Our plan was to first take on her mighty rapids, then, properly soaked, to make the pilgrimage up to Gangotri-the glacial source of the Ganga. The "Great Mother" was more wily than we'd anticipated however, and not so easily subdued. Due to some unexpected "obstacles," we never did make it to Gangotri, but we still managed to have a helluva time out on the water.

... that went on for 15 minutes. Noooooo! The town is very westernised and therefore much more chilled than other parts of India. You can go into shops and browse without the shop owner jumping up and shoving potential purchases in your face. This makes an atmosphere much more conducive to buying things, and I've finally acquired some nicer clothes. All the tourist restaurants seem to be jack-of-all-trades offering pizza, pasta, mexican, israeli, chinese, english (I ...

... above ours. In a sleeping-pill induced drowsiness we were questioned for ninety minutes by 'Mr Talkative' and his son. Eventually they got the message that we were tired and they reluctantly let us get back to sleep. At 2.30am they woke us up again to disembark and say goodbye. We actually got back to sleep quite quickly only to be woken up by more banging on the door an hour later. D defended the door even more vehemently this time but to no avail - the ticket inspector was ...