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2003-08-25 - Musoorie - Rudraprayag (Day 132)

The mist is still surrounding Mussoorie when I get up and ride out of town for an ethereal but very pleasant view of the hills down to the Indian plains just peaking through the clouds. I ride out following the GPS into the wilderness with just a single lane road clinging to the side of the hill above a thousand km drop down the side. Everything is damp and I am all alone on the roads.

About an hour out of Mussoorie, it clears a bit and dries out and I can see the lush hills that I am driving on. The thought occurred how incredibly cool all this is, this place that I'm in, the ride, the weather - hell, I'm cool for making this happen. I was pretty happy with myself, for about 5 minutes. That's when I realized that I had planned to fill the tank in Dera Dun but since gas stops had been so plentiful for the past few days on the plains, I had stopped worrying about planning gas. Well, guess what, I'm back in the hills now and there aren't any gas stations and I've less then 90km worth of gas left and no idea where the next station is. From the Lonely Planet it looks like I have about 120km to go before I reach the next major town, this could be a problem! In just 5 minutes, I'd gone from "Mr. Cool" to "Mr. Fool"!

I ride another 10 km and finally find a little tea stall, which tells me there is gas 50 km, down the road and I relax a little. Not completely as there is always that potential for stretching of the lengths of roads, or more likely, I'll take the wrong one which doesn't leave much margin for error, but its probable I'll make the gas station which does leave me laughing at myself for having too much fun and forgetting what I'm doing.

I make the gas stop and the rain has started again. Sitting it out for an hour at a tea stall, I am back on the road well down from the peak of the hills and heading back down towards the valley.

That is until the GPS lead me to a simply indescribable scar on the earth where for several kilometers in all direction the topsoil of the earth had been removed and there were deep pits of excavation in every direction. I didn't know what was going on for the longest time but because of the excavation, there were dirt roads in every direction, which were indistinguishable from the path that I was now on, and thus I didn't know where in the heck to go. I stopped a couple of dump trucks loaded with Earth, which kept me on roughly the right track and I road for several kilometers slowly up through these scars. Getting higher I noticed a wall and it was like a version of Star Wars was playing in my head ¡V

Luke - "That's a very strange hill over there! Look at how it goes straight up!"
Han -"That's no hill, it's the Death Star! - Turn this beast around!"

While I have never been to see the Hoover Dam, the pictures I've seen of it create a picture of something smaller then the incomplete dam, which I now realized I was riding at the base of. It was simply huge and an as impressive a structure as anything I have yet seen. Riding past the damn I was not able to get a look at the lake behind it unfortunately but can only guess at the size of the reservoir, which must have been created. I was again amazed to see that the torn Earth and constant stream of dump trucks extended onto this side as well and it was more then an hour till I'd passed all of the places where Earth was being torn up to build that dam.

Presumably, because of all the construction the road had turned to deep mud, rutted dirt roads and water washouts so the afternoon was all hard riding. By 4pm I was wiped out and when I saw a hotel perched above the river I'd been following I was more then happy to pull over and put my feet up on the roof and watch the sunset. This river is one of the ones flowing down from the glaciers of the Himalayas and the whole area was on the path of Hindu pilgrims who go up to the temples and sacred sites in the hills where the Ganges starts.

There was one more bit of amusement for the evening in that after I had gone to bed in this one room hotel, I heard a curious sound sort of like water drops from the ceiling. I reached out in the dark and felt for my camera bad, but no drops on it, and to my other bag, which was on the cot next to me, again nothing. So I get up, turn the light on, and start looking around. I finally see that the back of the beds headboard has a bunch of holes in it and there are wood droppings on the floor - the bed I was sleeping on was infected with termites and the sound I heard was their chewing away at the bed innards. Well if a troop of terminates was going to share the room with me I could only hope they would stick to their side as I moved to the other side of the bed.

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