GC Mouli's Blog

Badrinath Dehradun Trip - Oct 2018

Flights:

Beautiful picturesque Dehradun Airport
Dehradun Airport - Two is a crowd :-)

Ground transport:

Prem-ji can be reached at -- 98971 83145 / 94124 09127

Accommodation :

Room with a view – Ganga Resort – Rishikesh
Neelkanth peak taken at 5AM from near our room.
GMVN Devlok Badrinath
(Not my picture. Google images)

Itinerary:

Day1 (Saturday):

Paramarth Niketan seen from the ferry
Ganga-ji in all her glory
Lakshman Jhoola beautifully lit up

Day 2 (Sunday):

And it dawns over the Himalayas.
Most of the road is like this. :-0

Dev Prayag - The first of the 5 Prayags that we would encounter on the way and back. Prayag means the confluence of 2 or more rivers. The Ganga river system gets built in these 5 Prayags. At Dev Prayag, The Alaknanda and Bhagirathi join to form what is formally known as Ganga, henceforth.

Click to see larger size. You can see the steps to bathe in the Prayag.
Super good food at Srinagar.

As we trudge uphill, the Alaknanda is still a fairly large river, meandering, cutting across the Garhwal Himalayas. As you will see in the full post below, the Alaknanda will follow us for most of the journey uphill.

Alaknanda - somewhere between Srinagar and Rudraprayag
Karna Prayag - Pindari Ganga merges with the Alaknanda
Nand Prayag - Nandakini merges with the Alaknanda
Chamoli and Bageshwar
Rapids on Alaknanda
Beautiful mountainscapes - nearing Joshimath.
Narasimha temple - Joshimath
VishnuPrayag - Dhauli Ganga merges with the Alaknanda
First snow peaks as we near Badrinath

Day 3 (Monday):  After an eventful Day 2, and a great darshan of Badri Vishal, Day 3 was the trudge back to Rishikesh.

Shankara Mutt - Joshimath
Rudra Prayag - Mandakini merges with Alaknanda

Day 4 (Tuesday): We had done Hardwar Rishikesh a couple of times before (when I used to live in Noida long ago). So, this time, we decided to explore Dehradun and surrounding places. We were in for a treat.

Sahasradhara - near Dehradun.
Tapkeswar Mandir - Tamasa River
Mindrolling Buddhist Monastery
Stupa at the Mindrolling Monastery
Prayer wheel at the Mindrolling Monastery

Day 5 :

History/Context for trip : My mother has been wanting to go to Badrinath for quite a long while. Both my father and mother had (and still have) heart ailments and had been advised not to do any sort of trekking or high altitude gimmickry. Badrinath is the only one of the four Char Dham shrines, which does not require you to do any trekking/walking. You can drive all the way up to Badrinath.

We decided to do it as comfortably as feasible ~ given that the parents are in the later part of their sixties. I tweet stormed most of what is there above, but blogging it here for posterity and for a one-stop-notes place.