During my recent trip to Uttarakhand , I was faced with a problem I had never encountered before. We were passing through Delhi, but we had hardly any time in the city. On earlier visits when I have had to change trains/flights at Delhi, I have always arrived in the morning and left again at night, visiting relatives in between. This time, I was arriving in the city at night, and leaving again early in the morning. There was hardly any time to visit people. I would only have a couple of hours with them before I’d have to leave again. For the first time, we considered booking a hotel, but there again, we were hesitant about the actual hotels, the costs involved, and the logistics of getting from the airport to the railway station and then back again from the station to the airport. That’s when we remembered reading something about a corporate-managed lounge at Delhi station. We soon figured out that we could book online and pay by the hour. Besides, we also learnt that there wasn’t ju
We made an early start from Jispa, at 7 am, after a breakfast of hot, buttered alu parathas, toast, and tea. All signs of habitation disappeared by the time we reached Sarchu, where we crossed into Ladakh from Himachal Pradesh. Today, it is a Union Territory, but then, this was still part of the state of Jammu and Kashmir. Borders, I believe , are simply lines drawn by man, over land, and geographically, there are usually few differences on either side of any border. However, here, the difference was stark. While in Himachal, we could still see scattered habitations, within Ladakh, we went miles before seeing signs of any, and when we did, they were usually military, or small shacks built for the convenience of visitors. The nature of every such settlement was temporary – to be dismantled with the arrival of winter. Nature itself felt harsher, more primal, both in the landscape and in the weather. We drove through endless roads meandering through the mountains, the landscapes unl