Mesmerizing Valley of Flowers: JOURNEY TO MESMERIZING VALLEY AND BACK... DAY 1:

Five of us... My cousin, My brother-in-law, My brother-in-law's wife, My wife and myself planned out to go on a trek to one of the most beautiful places in the world "The Valley of Flowers" in Uttarakhand, India. We surfed quite a bit about the place on the internet and thanks to all the bloggers, we found a lot of information and as suggested by many that the best time to visit is July and August of the year, we planned out our holiday between 1st July 2015 and 10th July 2015. We included Haridwar, Badrinath and Delhi in our itinerary.

Day 1 (1st July 2015): Bengaluru-New Delhi to Haridwar

We flew from Bengaluru to Delhi. Air Asia.. fairly a new flight I guess.. It was a pleasant flight all along without any turbulence. Landed in Terminal 3 at 12:15pm. We had booked an Innova through zoom cars. There is a pick up point of zoom cars near Centaur Hotel which is very close to Terminal 3. There is a free bus pick up and drop to the Centaur Hotel from the Airport. We took the service and reached the zoom car pick up point. The Innova was ready and on unlocking the vehicle we found that the battery of the mobile they provide was not working. There were two guys around from the zoom car, who helped us replace the battery. But this really took a long time out of us. But zoom car guys had provided us a very good, fairly new Innova which had run just about 7000km.We could start driving from Delhi only by 2:15pm.

No lunch, but we had some snacks carried with us. Thought we can go on for some time and leave Delhi and stop over in some place for lunch. But the drive through Delhi was bad and drive out of Delhi through Ghaziabad, Meerut and Modinagar was pathetic. Heavy traffic, people crossing road every now and then. By about 4:30pm we were somewhere near Meerut, and we stopped over for "lunch". Some place called "Garden Restaurant". Our expectation out of the place was low may be, the Aloo Paratha and Aloo Piyaz Paratha were very good.

Started from there and till Modinagar and a little beyond the traffic was pathetic. But later the drive was good all the way till Haridwar through Roorkie. We had to pay road tax enroute as we crossed two states, UP and UK. The zoom car was of Delhi registration. There are quite a few road side "Online RTO Tax collection" centres near the border of the state. The one we paid was in a Dhaba! The guy has one lap top with an internet connection and a printer. We paid about 1600 rupees as tax for next 8 days of stay in Uttarakhand. (We had already crossed over UP without paying any taxes... looks like we missed seeing any "Tax collection centers"... he he he.. ). By the time we reached Haridwar it was around 9pm. That's a long drive for just 231km drive.

We had booked a place in Vyas Ashram in Haridwar. The place was really nice. Babuji who takes care of that place had blocked 2 A/c rooms for us. The place is a quite and nice serine one, with a beautiful Vyasa temple surrounded by a lovely garden on the banks of Ganga River. Yes Ganga river flows right behind the Vyas Ashram and we could hear the roar of the flow of the river. The rooms were also not that very expensive. The A/c rooms were priced at 700 rupees a day for a 3 bed room. We booked 2 rooms and boarded there. Since it was quite late, the dinner was not available at Vyas Ashram and hence we walked a few yards to a nice small road side restaurant for dinner. It was a lovely dinner we had. Parathas and Lassis. That was a stomach full. We walked back and retired into our rooms and rested after a long day of travel.