The pic above shows a foxy grape ("kingore") to my right...light green in color. The grapes are dark purple in color, and real sour. I guess the foxes like 'em that way. But then, the gorge descending down does contain a few remnant of the pack of wolves.
Anyway, now that one has got to descend down to the gorge of the Magical Mystery Falls....
...one faces a dilemma....horns of a dilemma...for at the plateau, the road bifurcates..one steep down left, the other to the right.
Which one to take...well, if it's a a newcomer's (mis)fortune to meet some really well-meaning mountain folk, they'll say.."Well, both lead to the Falls..." And they are right, for both do...
But the one to the left is rather steep, and about a kilometre longer, but the view is far better....for it passes through wonderful shrub country.....last time, I ventured a little down via the left "pakdandi".....
for I had to reach the exact spot where....in the pic below, where...colonel wyatt's younger son met a tragic end at the hands of a tiger, the story which I'll tell later in some other posting....
That was way back...when tigers did sometimes venture out up into the mountains from the denser Terai....in search of prey. This particular tiger had turned into a man-eater...probably tired of hunting deer....probably taking it a bit too easy under the influence of the Hill of the Pixies...for tigers rarely hunt man in the Himalayas. Anyway, that's a diff'rent story. This gorge , at about 5500 feet , harbours a stream, that springs its way forward to about 2000 feet into the Doon Valley where the Terai starts....there is still quite an unbroken strip of forest.
Alas, there are no tigers to be found here nowadays...perhaps a harmless leopard that'll slink away into the undergrowth if one happens to be in its way sometime in the late evening. In the pic, one can see the upper gorge leading to the Woodstock streams....
But I took the right path....the easier one. As it was springtime, the bees were keeping busy, as were numerous other insects/ butterflies...for one finds spotted butterflies of the most unimaginable colors in this valley.
The bees never sting.....they are too busy with their work.
The climb down is about a 1000 feet.....
and this pic shows the end of the trail leading to the stream...
On both sides, especially to right are kalijhora bushes.....we used to call them "pahari palak" or by some other name....but they grow profusely. Surinderji told me the locusts brought the seedlings long back from the Kumaons...and now they've colonized the mountains...these have small white flowers in springtime
Wonderful thing about this gorge is there are numerous rivulets, springs flowing into the main stream...
That later....
1 comment:
Now where is this waterfalls exactly
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