At the meeting point, the participants trickle in little by little. Several tours and groups start from here, but we are nevertheless quickly in the right bus for our tour to Gaumukh Tapovan with Indiahikes. The group begins to cautiously get to know sniff of each other. There is mother Nandita with her thirteen-year-old son, who live in Goa. They immediately start talking to Saurav about real estate prices in Goa. Directly in front of us sit the initially very quiet Shobha and Karthik. We first assume that they are a couple and are a bit surprised that they hardly communicate with each other. Monika has arrived alone and although her name sounds very German, she is a real Indian, originally from Dehradun, who now lives and works in Dehli.
In addition we have Lukas in the bus, who comes from Brazil and is one of our trek guides and two people of the kitchen team. In a separate SUV, a married couple and two work colleagues are also driving along, we only get to know them properly on the trek.
After a short time, the conversations fall silent, heads nod down and everyone disappears into dreamland. Martin and I only make it as far as microsleep and otherwise doze off listening to audio books, while Monika and Shobha have built up admirable skills over the years and manage to sleep for almost the entire trip. We stop for breakfast, lunch and afternoon chai, otherwise the minibus bravely toils up and down the narrow and bumpy roads through the mountains. Every now and then the road is almost washed away by landslides, it becomes narrow and tricky at times. The Indian drivers have less of a problem with this. They honk, they overtake others and without hesitation they set back 100m to make room for larger vehicles.
Occasionally, a disgusting stench permeates the bus. The cause is always garbage dumps, sometimes small, sometimes larger. The shocking thing is that these are in the middle of villages. We see cows at the top of the pile of garbage, lying comfortably or digging for food. While we try not to breathe or only very shallowly for minutes in disgust, the people here have to live in this stench day in and day out, eating fruits and vegetables grown in this filthy environment. The garbage problem is present in India, but these proportions are new to us.
After 13 hours of drive we finally reach Gangotri. A part of the village is not accessible by car, so we shoulder our backpacks and walk a few more minutes before we reach the Indiahikes base camp. It is a small hostel with dormitory rooms, nicely situated by the river.
Since Martin and I want to spend the night as a couple and not in separate rooms, we have rented a hotel. We don't want to isolate ourselves and so we have dinner together with everyone, listen to the first briefing of our guides and do a heart rate and oxygen saturation test before we take our backpacks and move on to our hotel. There we snuggle into our sleeping bags - linen are not so clean -, watch another video on the symptoms of altitude sickness, after all we are already at an altitude of over 3000m, and then slowly fall asleep.
Come with us on the trek and explore the hiking to the source of Ganga river to the foot of sacred Mount Shivling.
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