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Published: September 1st 2010
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The road to Nainital (via Delhi) was hot... hotter... hottest.
With 2 days to cover the distance we decided to get an early start, but, the roads were not in favour of this... the road from Bera to Pali was a combination of SH 16 and NH14 - both equally good (or bad).
The road was bad after a while and did not improve till we reached Kishangarh (near Ajmer). The 100kms from Kishangarh to Jaipur was the best on that day. After Jaipur the 6-laning work was in progress and it greatly reduced speeds due to the deep excavations. Between that and the traffic as we neared Manesar & Gurgaon we made it to Delhi exhausted after 14 hours on the road.
But the rasam and curd rice waiting at my cousin Sharmila's place kept the spirits high. Sharmila and Nisudan run Ciocollato, making the best Finnish chocolates we have ever tasted. naturally the dessert that night was a collection of their best.
The next morning we took the road to Nainital and it passes thru the entire city of Delhi before exiting the NCR at Ghaziabad. Driving in Delhi is really 'capital punishment'.
The
weather was very, very hot... and being the weekend there were hundreds of people heading to Nainital just as we were... so every hotel and dhaba was packed for lunch. We found Apni Haveli on the outskirts of Moradabad which served us a decent meal and we were on the way.
The road (NH 24) wasn not much of a highway and was bad in some parts, considerably impairing our speed... taking us till 4pm to reach Haldwani - the base of the Himalayas. Haldwani is known as the "Gateway of Kumaon" and the name literally "forest (vana) of Haldu trees".
Haldwani is also the last place that you can attend to any major problems in your vehicle... after this, the entire Himalaya range has only small mechanic shops where they can fix a flat tyre or oil leak. We had been here before, when we had to change some clutch plates on the Swift during our 2007 trip.
We got a call from Radhika (sister of the home owner) at The Hive and she said it would take us 2-3 hours form Haldwani to get to Nainital, because of the heavy rains all over the hills.
We stopped over at a Cafe Coffee Day and picked up a hot cup of coffee and headed for the hills.
As we ascended the ghats we found the temperature magically dropping... clearly stated on the bold display in our Xylo’s DDIS... from high 40s to low 20s... in a span of 20kms... we were actually feeling a bit chill. Between enjoying the sunset over the mountains, navigating thru the weekend rush all over Nainital and enjoying the first rain in two weeks we made it to our 7th Mahindra Homestay destination Dr. Ranjit Bhargava's “The Hive”
Dr. Ranjit Bhargava's “The Hive” our 7th Mahindra Homestay destination, is a very nice heritage cottage on the Ayarpatta slopes that used to Christopher Corbett's house - father of the world renowned Jim Corbett, hunter, conservationist and naturalist, famous for slaying a large number of man-eating tigers and leopards in India.
Getting here is pretty simple actually, mainly because they have 'one-way-ed' most of the roads in Nainital. Follow the mall road upto Jama Masjid, then ask someone for Mannu Maharani hotel and follow the signs to The Hive (or Silent Trail Luxury Villa) from there.
Our room was
on the first floor right next to Shruti and Rajit Bhargava's room from where we got a good view of the Nainital hillside. A short walk from the cottage and we got a birds eye view of the Naini-lake...
Dr. Bhargava is a noted environmentalist who has been very active in lake conservation activity. He was awarded the Padma Shri recently for his activities and we got to see the private side of this public icon.
Though we did not get much time to interact and chat with him on the environmental impact of all the tourist activity in Uttarakhand we saw him walking around the gardens putting bird-feed out for all the pigeons and sparrows. All that free bird-feed was good for us, we go to take pictures of the birds.
Shruti, who was very busy with her son's music class and her INTACH (The Indian National Trust For Art and Cultural Heritage) work was keen to point out that only in the last few years they have been spotting sparrows in Nainital. “this is all a result of climate change... it's getting hotter every year”, she said.
All the deforestation was evident right from
our room... making way for modern concrete hotels. We hope that Bhargava and his friends are able to stop this irresponsible growth in the region.
There were over a dozen staff members catering to these guests and close to a dozen cars parked in the driveway... really the busiest homestay we had been to till now.
Though the first floor feels like a home-stay the ground floor rooms and lobby feel more like a hotel. There were atleast 30 walk-in customers every day asking for rooms. Going to show how busy the place was... but apparently in Nainital “every rooms sells” according to Radhika, who “manages the hotel part of the homestay”.
The rooms were very comfortable, with TV, DTH, a modern heater and multi functional shower - the kind of stuff you see in the Kohler ads.
We had WiFi in the lobby area and between bird-watching the pigeons, man-watching the other guests and reading books on Jim Corbett, we caught up on email over cups and cups of nice hot tea while we 'chilled out' for 2 days.
We were ready to go from Corbett’s father’s house to Corbett’s house at Kaladhungi (aka
Choti Haldwani) to stay at our 8th Mahindra Homestay, Suman and Ome Anand’s Camp Corbett.
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