Kiran Jonnalagadda’s Blog

I found myself in Mcleodganj last May, in the company of TB Dinesh and Guillaume Marceau. Dinesh wanted to pick up some luggage a friend had left behind in nearby Dharamkot, so off we went up the hill.

Man, was it hard! The incline could have killed me. I was out of breath and my feet ached. My camera bag felt like a huge burden. I had to stop for breath every turn and rest minutes. When we finally reached Dharamkot, I refused to leave the tea shop for the next couple hours. We hung around ordering several rounds of tea and snacks. Dinesh and Guillaume then wanted to walk further, so I reluctantly tagged along. The body ached but the mind couldn’t refuse the challenge. We walked all the way up hill, past prayer flags in the woods, past a shrine to the earlier Panchen Lama, the current Dalai Lama’s late teacher, up to the top, and down again through the Tibetan Children’s Village, along the water pipeline, back to Mcleodganj.

I had cramps the next day. When I returned to Bangalore and checked my weight, I was down two kilos. In a day’s walk.

And so, a year later and halfway through this year’s resolution to improve health, I had to check again. Was it really so bad, or was I just so out of shape? Has all the cycling in Bangalore and walking in Ladakh’s thin air helped at all?

It has: the walk this time felt like a casual stroll through the woods.

Kishore’s friends were doing the Sakleshpur-Yedakumeri-Subramanya railway trek. Having long wanted to do it too, I tagged along. There were 34 people in the group (of them 15 girls) so we pretty much had the bus to ourselves. We started at Donigal, a few kilometres from Sakleshpur, where the road conveniently passes within a couple hundred metres of the tracks.



This section of track has been abandoned for several years, apparently for conversion from metre to broad gauge. It is now a popular trekking route with both bus drivers and railway workers accustomed to the sight of backpack wielding youth.

The bus dropped us off at 5 AM. We spent an hour or so under the nearest street lamp, distributing rented sleeping mats and food packets. Someone had mistaken the trek for a picnic and gone shopping for flavoured milk in glass bottles, potato chips and other salted (thirst inducing) snacks, entire cartons of apple and orange juice, loaves of bread, with butter, and other such items that were low on energy while high on packaging weight. We got rid of most of them before boarding the bus; the rest we had to carry.

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