manu's blog

Day 5, Wed Aug 27 2008 (contd.) : After checking into our hotel in Badrinath and taking bath, we were all fresh by 6 pm or so. We were in a chill mood and wanted to take it easy, so we thought "lets just find out about the temple - where is it, what are the timings etc - today and do the darshan tomorrow". One specific thing we wanted to find out was where Adi Kedareshwaram temple was. Actually, it is said that one should go to Barinath only after visiting Kedarnath , and if you are not able to do so, you should at least visit Adi Kedareshwaram temple, which is in Badrinath itself, before visiting Badrinath temple. We asked the caretaker, but he didn't seem to know where it was. When we came out of the hotel, we came to know that temple was pretty close from there. In fact it was visible from the other side of the road (our hotel was in the higher parts of the town). We decided to go till the temple at least, even if not inside. It was an enchanting walk till the temple

Day 5, Wed Aug 27 2008: So we had already finished the difficult parts of the trek by now. Today we had to descend back to Govindghat. Our knees were still paining from yesterday's roller coaster descent. After our daily routine of things, we finally departed from Ghangharia, our trekking base for last 3 days. As we kept on walking, our knees also got better slowly. Actually, it's true, when you decide to do some thing, things usually fall in place. We reached Govindghat in 3.5 hours if I recall correctly. We had our lunch there. I tried calling home but phones were not working in Govindghat that day :) So beware, these kinda things, which may sound strange to you, happen quite often in places like these. Retracing our steps from 3 days back, we came to the main road from where we were "likely" to get a vehicle for pious town of Badrinath. Here we heard the not so encouraging news that road to Badrinath was blocked due to landslide. We were still hopefull though and

Day 4, Tue Aug 26. After a wonderful, pleasureful and captivating trek in Valley of Flowers , time was now to take on the challenging ascent of Hemkund . The trek goes from an altitude of 3048 m to 4320 m over a distance of 6 km. This trek is dubbed as challenging by even most avid trekkers. I think it's more the lack of oxygen and other high altitude conditions that make this trek challenging. We got up at about 6 am again. Lit up a candle for bathroom as it was little dark (no electricity, remember?), dealt with a centipede in our basin, freshened up, ordered for hot water bucket, had bath and were ready to rock by 7:30 or so. I don't remember what we had for breakfast that day - must be aloo paratha considering the limited options :) Weather wasn't looking very good. The day was overcast. There was mist everywhere and soon it started drizzling too, which was not a good thing as we were not carrying any rain gear with us. Pankaj's jacket was water resistant (not water

Against all your expectations, part 3 comes much sooner. So, where were we? Yeah, we were sleeping in the TRH in Ghangharia. Day 3, Mon Aug 25 . We got up early again at about 6-6:30. Had tea, ordered for the hot water bucket, took bath and phew, we were ready to trek again. Now, when it comes to having breakfast in Ghangharia, there are not many options. In fact the only options are aloo paratha, if you are lucky and there is bread in town then butter toast, and if you don't mind eating eggs which could be 2-3 months old then bread omelet. On that day we had butter toast. Bread slices were the smallest I had ever seen and to make us feel even worse about it, each butter toast cost 35 bucks. Anyway, we started our trek at around 8:40 am or so. After climbing on a decently steep trek for about 10-15 min we reached the point where the route for valley of flowers separates from that going to Hemkund. This is also where you have to pay the valley of flowers national park entry fee. Yes

Day 2, Sun Aug 24 : After spending a good night in Joshimath, time was now to further our journey . Our day started early. We got up at 6 and had checked out of the TRH by 7:30 am. Plan was to take some mode of transportation till Govindghat. From there we were to start our first trek, to Ghangharia. We got a jeep for Govindghat from Badrinath taxi stand in Joshimath. After a drive of less than an hour, the jeep dropped us just at the border of Govindghat. From the road itself, we could see Laxman Ganga, river that flows from glaciers beyond Hemkund, falling into Alaknanda. After walking for about 10-15 min, we reached our trek start point. By the way, our cellphones had stopped working as soon as we left Joshimath, so luckily we were unreachable now and we remained so till the end of our trip. We hired a porter for our luggage here (for Rs. 405). Though there are lockers available in Govindghat for luggage, we didn't want to leave anything behind as we were going to be in Ghanghar

Last year, after our Ladakh trip itself we had decided that our next trip would be to Valley of Flowers - a national park, nestled high in the lap of western Himalayas. It's in the north-east corner of Garhwal region of Uttarakhand state, near the holy town of Badrinath . As reaching the valley requires a trek of more than 17 km, and then there is a trek of Hemkund Sahib nearby that you wouldn't want to miss, it was essentially going to be a trekking trip . Though we wanted to do this trip since last year, ideal time was the constraint. Ideal time to visit the valley is mid-July to August as that's the time when flowers are in full bloom. We decided to do the trip in the last week of August (Aug 23 - Aug 31). There was not much to be planned for this trip as itinerary in these parts of Himalayas is pretty much decided by the moods of the mountains. This region is particularly infamous for landslides. So, we only thought about the going part. Now, since scope of luxuri

Lately, I have been getting some queries for "test pac files on windows", "pactester for windows" etc in website access logs and emails. Compiling pactester on Windows, though possible, is quite a complicated process. So much so that it's almost impractical to ask users to do so. Since it's a perl script, packaging it for Windows is even more difficult. To avoid packaging difficulties of perl code and now that pacparser is there, I think it makes sense to implement pactester using pacparser. That's exactly what I did in last couple of days, implemented pactester in C using pacparser library. I have compiled it for Windows and uploaded zipped binaries on pactester downloads page: http://code.google.com/p/pactester/downloads/list Also, to simplify things and as an added bonus to pacparser users, I have decided to distribute this version of pactester (implemented in C using pacparser API) along with pacparser from next release. Thanks to open source that