Smoke gets in your eyes

We travel into the hills today. Our train leaves early and we are required to get up at 0400 am in the morning.Basic breakfast in the hotel. We say goodbye to our lap of luxury and motor to the Delhi railway station. Coolies takes our bag on board

Not our trai

Our train

and we settle in for our 6 hour journey. It turns out we are to be served breakfast which comes in dribs and drabs over a number of hours and isn't half bad.

Our itinerary tells us we will have a 30 minute drive to our final destination and we will be met at Kathgodam station by our guide. Nobody is there to greet us at our carriage but we eventually locate our driver who is absolutely fluent in Hindi. We are surrounded by the usual chaos of beggars, touts and assorted rascals. An hour later we arrive at a cottage which we assume is our destination and are served lunch by a surly native, who is also fluent in Hindi; strangely, our luggage is still in the car and we are signaled to remount and we are then driven for about 3 hours up a road with more curves than a pretzel factory, more turns than a seagull colony, more U's than a flock of sheep and more hairpins than a hairdresser convention, all accompanied by precipitous drops with no safety rails.

Shivashram

My mind hearkens back to reports of vehicles plunging into ravines, never to be seen again; I nearly wear out the Jesus handle as trucks and buses come around blind corners as we are overtaking. Eventually, the car stops beside the road and we are approached by a couple more natives. They indicate we must follow them down a steep path, which we will later know as "coronary track".

Looking forward to the trip back, no doubt?

After 20 mintes of scrambling we arrive at our lodgings, which seem comfortable enough. We are told dinner is at 7pm and as there is a certain nip in the air that the woodfired heater will be fired up during our evening repast.

After quite a fine dinner, served in a capacious dining room down a steep 50 metre track,

we return to find our room filled with thick smoke and one of the locals trying to fix the leaking heater with what appears to be raw pastry dough-perhaps he is trying to cook chapatis?

The assistant to the assistant manager explains that the only way to stop the smoke is to throw water over the fire. Now we have a smoke filled room which is also icy cold and then asks me if I am now happy? I ring our agent in Delhi who is sympathetic.

In the morning we wake and have the appearance and smell of frozen kippers!