I will start by saying, a guide book is a just a book and not a guide. I only now fully appreciate what it is to have someone show you the way through a place that in my view has no clear path. Our original plan was to trek from Sangam Chatti to Lake Dodital, which was very easy to find our way with plenty of places to stop for food and chai. I am running out of time at the internet cafe so I will keep the post quite brief and hopefully let a series of pictures tell the story. Our mind changed when we were in manjhi and decided to camp near a group of Indian, they all spoke English very well and we understood that they were under taking the same trek as us. It was only until the morning when we left the lake that they were not planning to trekking over the pass. I was over confident that with a guide book in my hand it was going to be straight forward. Only a couple hours into leaving the Darba pass we seem to be following a faint trail over some dangerous patches of ice. It got to around 5 pm and we were very lost. We hiked up to a high point and saw a place in the distance that showed some sign that people had been there before, a burnt out camp fire and flat area to pitch the tents. We were faced with a hard decision to either carry on hiking up to try and re find the trail or descend down an extremely steep slope and cross a frozen river to safety. We were running out of day light and decided to try and make it to the camp site. To put it bluntly, it was the scariest moment of my life, but we made it to the other side of the river with a few scratches and boots filled with mud. We pulled out a few ray mears tricks, one was melting snow through a t-shirt for water and placing a metal container on a rock in the fire filled with snow. A little bit of advice when melting snow near a fire, if you have a lid for a metal container, use it. Otherwise you'll be burping up smokey flavored water the following day. We ate the food we had and built up a big fire to warn off any animals. As the previous night we had a Leopard outside our tent. We stashed the remaing food in under a pile of rocks near the fire in the hope that if a bear did come it would be able to lift the heavy stones. Fortunately we all had a decent nights sleep with no bears and no leopards, unfortunately the stack of rocks wasn't crow proof and crow flew off with Jerrys chocolate bars, haha I don't think I have even seen Jerry so annoyed. Ok seems like I am telling the story now, but I really have to go, anyway the following day we found a definite path that took us to a steep gully that was explained in my book, we hiked down this into a dense forest and after a couple hours hit another path. We spent the rest of the day finding and losing paths that took us north west through the forest and across rivers. Until we bumped in some shepherds. It was an amazing feeling meeting people again, they told us to carry on the same path, which again eventually seem to disappear again. We made it back to the shepherds who seemed to find us very entertaining, but we pleaded with them to take us to Hanuman Chatti, they agreed to take us the following morning. However just as we were about to spend the night in the forest a knight in shinning armour appeared! Prymod and his wife had spent the day digging up roots in the forest for medicine, we agreed to give them 500 rs to take us to Hanuman Chatti, we said our goodbyes to the shepherds and went off at break neck speed down the mountain following paths that broke off of other paths. We arrived Nishni around 7pm and kindly Prymod offered up his home for us to sleep and fed us very well. Many villagers greeted us and we had a wonderful evening. I look forward to seeing Prymod again some day.
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