Gulmarg
- October 20th, 2021
A 9 am start was what was planned for our drive to Gulmarg. We had landed late in the evening from Pahalgam, the previous day and had checked into Royal Heritage in Srinagar where we were to stay for the next couple of days.
Breakfast done, we started off on our drive from Srinagar through some very good roads to Gulmarg, located around 50 kms away.Touted to be Asia’s 7th best Ski destination, this place also happens to be the heartland of winter sports in India. What is unique about this Gondola ride is that it is the second longest and second highest in the world.
Yaseen bhai, our driver had made arrangements with a local Tourism Department recognized guide who was to help us with our ticketing for the Gondola ride which takes tourists through a ropeway to the snow clad Apharhwat Peak, located at a height of around 14,000 feet.
From the place we got dropped by our cabbie to the start point of the Gondola ride is hardly a distance of a km but the locals coerce you, force you to get onto ponies to get to the point which gets on the nerves but the idea was as advised to just keep ignoring them and walking on.
We picked up some additional layer of clothing and some gum boots before the Gondola station to help protect our original winter wear from not getting soiled when we finally hit the snow.
We went on to join the queues for hopping onto the Gondola which was to take us to Phase 1, while the local guide who was to accompany us got the tickets arranged.
While the tickets were printed as Rs.740/- apiece, we were charged 800 for each citing reasons of paying money to get one’s way through.
This appeared to be the de facto way of working in this system between the guides and the Tourism officials.
We realized this in a little while that there was a much larger nexus with these guides conniving with the locals for either arranging the additional clothing or getting us the ponies or even when we were to have a meal at one of the wayside shops when returning back after our horse ride.
The Climb up
A 9 minute ride brought us to Kongdoori station, the end of Phase I and the base point for the ascent to Phase 2. The ride was a bit scary for the control room in their effort to balance the flow of gondola cars on both sides of the circular ropeway stopped it for a few minutes and with the breeze being strong, the gondola cars were swinging around. We stepped out at Kongdoori only to be informed that we were a good 30 minutes late in missing the tickets for the ride to Phase 2 which would take us to the top of the peak.
The Phase 2 ride would have costed us Rs.1,000/- apiece where as we were given to understand that after stepping out of the Gondola, one could indulge in riding around on snow sledges, do some skiing and also playing around with snow and of course in much colder climes.
While we were coming to terms ruminating on our botched up plans of seeing snow, our guide suggested that we hire ponies and climb upto the snow point and also see a waterfall and some lush green meadows on the way back.
We ended up settling for 4 ponies to take us at Rs.2,500/- each after presuming that we had struck a hard bargain from the initial quote of Rs.4,000/- and only to learn that people get horses for even Rs.1,500/-.
The video above was shot in peak winter in Phase 1 itself and shared by our guide.
And we finally got to see some stretches of snow
The Awesome Foursome
We saw the waterfall enroute but were too tired and hungry to go close to it and reached our base camp at around 4 in the evening. A quick lunch of some Khichdi (a slightly watery combo of Lentils and Rice), Maggi and Onion fritters (what we lovingly call pakodas) restored parity to our hunger and tiredness and we hopped onto the long queues to start our descent back to the base station. Yaseen drove in to the Gondola station to pick us up since it was already late and by around 5.30 PM we started our drive back to Srinagar. Lot of banter from Yaseen our driver who regaled us with his stories and experiences of ferrying so many families across India and in so many different seasons and his humorous challenges of communicating with families from South , his view on the ground situation in Kashmir and a little bit of politicking and by the time we realized we reached the porch of our Hotel.
