Namaste 🙏
Hope you’re doing great!!!
Wishing everyone a really, really happy New Year, and I hope everyone had a great time last night in New Year’s Eve. The #winterchallenge has also been officially ended and the results will be out in a few days. I’m really excited to see the results. Congratulations to everyone who made it in the top 10 list. The competition was really tough in the last few days of the challenge. As you guys know from my last post that I am home after a long extended stay in Delhi NCR, and I am really loving it back home.
Today was the first day of the New Year and I wanted to make it really chilled out so I along with my cousin and my brother decided to stroll around in our village and visit the watchtower that was situated at the bottom end of the village. It was a go to place and we used to go there every once in a while when we were kids.
The mountains were still full of snow and the views were just mesmerising as you can see. It was a sunny day today with occasional clouds in between the sun was warming up the weather for us, and we really loved the sunshine in our faces.
Last night, the temperature dropped to 0°C and it was really cold night, but we had a good time celebrating New Year’s Eve next to a bonfire. Today, we woke up a bit late because of that. But as soon as we woke up, we decided to go for the walk till the watch tower.
This area of my village is quite secluded. There are a couple of cabins and cottages built there that are listed on Airbnb and apart from them, there are no houses present there. This area is full of Apple orchids, and there are a plenty of them present here.
After working for around 15 to 20 minutes, we reach the end of our village from where we can see the whole town of Patlikuhal in its full glory. This is the main town of our area where the main market is situated and it’s right next to the national Highway number three, which connects to Manali.
On the left side, here is one watchtower situated, which looks really beautiful as this place is right in the middle of the valley and you can see in all directions from here. The government decided to make a watch tower hair so that the forest fires can be spotted.
It was a good project, for sometimes, but later they realise that they made it very delicate and one windy day. It was destroyed by the strong wind, and from that day, it’s been abandoned and we visit here quite often.
Until a few years back, I used to climb on top of it as it was a bit stronger back then, but nowadays I was afraid that the wood really weak because of the weathering, so we decided to just stay in the ground and not climb on it.
The view from the ground was also amazing, so there was no need for us to climb on top of it anyway. We spent a few minutes there and later decided to go near a secret spot. That was also our childhood favourite.
This place is situated to the backside of the watch tower, and it’s on such a cliff that you can see the river from up there.
It’s not that far away from here, it’s just a quick five minutes walk from there. The views from this place are just amazing. As you can see the photographs. Everything is quite dry and brown nowadays and there isn’t a lot of greenery available, but this kind of vibe is totally different than the wife that’s present here in the other times of the year.
We were standing on the cliff and enjoying the warm sunlight that was falling on our faces with the mesmerising views of the Himalayas. All around us. We were talking about all the childhood memories that we had about this place.
When we were kids, we used to come here a couple times every day in winter time as it was our winter vacation going on at this time of the year, so it was the same time of the year, but things are different. Now we are all grown up and everything has changed. Everyone is quite busy nowadays and it’s quite rare that we all cousins get to meet together, but somehow this year we were lucky so we were enjoying that kind of vibe of togetherness..
The Beas river just looks very amazing from up there, and all you can hear is the sound of birds singing and river flowing with no traffic sounds from up here.
At a little distance, we could also see some activities going on like paragliding and rafting. A hot air balloon was also slowly rising up from the middle of the valley and it was just looking amazing as it was with the snow capped mountains in the background and that made it look more dramatic.
We spent around half an hour there, talking about all the things and catching up with everyone, and after that, we decided to get back to our home and enjoy the freshly prepared meals by my mom. On our way back, we saw that people were busy in pruning their trees and reshaping them for the next harvest.
In these photographs, you can see the little sticks falling on the ground. After the pouring has been done on the particular trees. This is the kind of life that everyone in city dreams of the kind of life that we live every day as mountain people. That’s the kind of life. One city guy who works 9 to 5 dreams of attaining when he gets retired.
We are extremely lucky that we are born in such beautiful places with clean air to breathe and everything clean around us and with that gratefulness. I’m starting my first day of the year and hoping to make this year the best year of my life and I wish everyone the same.
Happy New Year, once again to all my fellow community members.
Last year has been a blast and looking forward to make this year better than last one.
Peace ☮️
