The British called Shimla The Queen of Hill Stations because of it's bountiful hiils. but as a tourist, I'd call it the Manhattan of Hill Stations. Shimla should be easily your last option if you were to choose between Shimla, Nainital and Kullu-Manali, simply because its cramped, crowded and commercialized. You see cemented structures everywhere you go in Shimla. The Mall has stores like Pringle, Adidas. It even has chain stores like Dominos and Subway! We were in Shimla for 6 days.
Hills Of Shimla
When we left home, both, my father and I had a fever and a severe cough. We were in no state to travel but luckily, we had our tickets booked in such a way that we got plenty of time to rest and recover. We flew to Delhi and booked a room at Dehli Gymkhana, where we stayed for the night. Initially when we made this booking, what we had in mind was that we'd do a little socializing, meet a couple of friends, have dinner with them in Delhi and then continue with our trip. As it turned out, neither did we have the strength to get out of our room, nor were our friends free that particular evening. So we just tended to ourselves, took lots of medicines, made lots of trips to the bathroom and whiled away a whole evening in the room of Delhi Gymkhana.
Next day, we took the Delhi-Kalka Shatabdi Express to a tiny town called Kalka, which was our link to Shimla. There were two ways of getting to Shimla from Kalka, One was getting a prepaid cab from the railway station and the other was catching the toy train to Shimla. The latter is known to be a slow painful journey so we opted the cab, which was a good decision because the way the weather changed as we climbed the ear-popping heights to Shimla through the Pine and Deodar trees was nothing short of breath-taking. But once we actually got there, the awe for beauty fizzled out completely because what we came to was just another busy town. It was just-another-place. It didn't feel like a hill station at all. I cannot describe the kind of shock we got, when our cab drove though the massive multi-storyed buildings of Shimla.
We stayed at a Resort called
Eastbourne. It was not located in Shimla but in a suburb nearby called Khalini. Eastbourne, from the outside, was a delightfully pretty place to be in, with its cute little rose garden and its lovely sit-outs next to the old grand oak trees The first day, we only rested. As it happened, both of us recovered well, but my mom fell sick, with slight fever for the next two out of six days that we there.
Rose Garden Of East Bourne: A View From Our Room
Let me tell you this. There isn't much one can actually DO in Shimla. It isn't like Manali where you have Rohtang Pass and Lovers/suicide Point and that fancy 12 km ride on the horse or even the white-water rafting. Manali has lots of adventure sports you can do even over the summer. But in Shimla, sadly you just have to make do with spa and enjoy the aminities and luxury your resort gives you over the summer, which in our case, wasn't much.
So instead of breaking this up into a day-wise detail of our stay there, it would be more informative if I described our stay in terms of what we actually DID in Shimla. Well, here I go:-
White Water RaftingYes. About 50 kilometers from Shimla is a place called
Tattapani. This is where the brown waters of Sutlej flow. The place gets it's name after the hot-water sulphur springs that flow around the river. white-water rafting here wasn't very widely known like in Manali. Not many people are aware of the fact that rafting is actually done in this river. But there are some private agencies that take people white-water rafting. And if you are living at the Hotel Wild Flower (i'll come to that in a bit), you get to do white water rafting for free! Otherwise it costs as much as a 1000 bucks per head, which is about 4 times more than what we paid for the same in Manali.
White Water Rafting at Sutlej
We did a 12 kilometre stretch. There weren't too many rapids and it wasn't as dangerous as in Rishikesh but it was still fun. When you do white water rafting, you never know how time flies. For the record, i've done it in Beas, Parvati, Ganges and now in Sutlej. Amazing sport I tell you! Especially when the raft topples (ours toppled in Rishikesh A.k.a The Ganges)
Hiking
Looking up the steps of Jakhu Temple
Th
e other thing to do there was hike. In particular, there was this temple high high up within the mountain ranges called the Jakhu Temple. It was a steep 45 minute climb upto this temple. At every square, we'd come across people who'd say to us, "you're gonna climb? why dont you take the car, it'll take you up with ease"...or "Are you sure you want to climb, it is really difficult, why don't you take this stick, we rent it out , it'll help you climb up." Unshaken by these very discouraging comments, we continued our journey to the top. We had to climb 2 very steep hills. And none of those locals were wrong about the difficulty level. It was to say the very least, HARD indeed! Every bench ahead would motivate us to pull our tired legs that were giving way under us, under our heavy bodymass. We would have to stop every few minutes to catch our breath, you get the picture. We would occassionaly cross people heading back to the market from the temple and they'd say to us, "bahot dipphicult hain jee, nahin kar paogey" and initially there was a point were we sat and contemplated whether we were actually going to climb all the way up after all those warnings! But we did. We went on. And it was a beatuiful climb up , exteremly picturisque.
The monkeys. What can i say, it was like i was living a scene out of Planet of the Apes. They were beatuiful, big and MANY in number. Those hills were inFested with monkeys - Hungry and fearless. They jumped on a couple that were climbing down with some
prasaadam back from the temple and these monkeys, they jumped on them and siezed all the food! It was really interesting. Even when we went up there, we were asked to remove our glasses, cameras, etc and keep them all away lest the monkeys would snatch those too.
Hills Of Shimla
Comments (1)
Wow! That was a really interesting post. Thanks for sharing your experiences of Shimla.