The trip from Mussoorie to Delhi, 320 km, was an example of the
frustrations of travel on Indian roads.  Travel is not fast, 60 km (38
miles)  per hour is good time, however, the scenery is always
interesting.   A main railroad line crosses the road three times.  Luck
is when you do not reach the track when the gate is closed for a train.
At the second crossing, when we had gotten about 2/3 of the way to
Delhi, we came to a closed gate and a huge back-up of traffic.  Vehicles
were crowed up to the gate on both lanes and the sides of the road.  How
traffic would get through from the other direction when the gate opened
was a mystery.  We were stuck there 1.5 hours, and finally in
desperation, followed a car with a red light and ended up on a side
road.  We lost the red light, but continued, in a caravan of cars
wandering through the countryside.  We went through villages, and over
very rough roads, finally reaching the highway again in about 20
minutes.  The car was acting funny, and when we stopped to call to tell
Tensing and Tsering's friends we would be late for dinner, we discovered
leaking diesel fuel.  A local person standing nearby recommended a
repair shop about a block away.  It was an excellent recommendation.
The fellow there discovered a broken fuel injector pipe, and replaced
it, after a bit of hammering and bending, with the pipe from a little
three wheeled taxi that he was working on.  (The ingenuity of some
mechanics is very impressive.  We watched a car being built from the
frame up at a metal shop in the Landour bazaar.)  We were on our way
again in about a half an hour, getting to Mukul and Benita's house on
the airport side of Delhi in time for dinner before picking up Steve.
 

Tensing learned that the delay was caused, not by a train, but by a
political rally in the nearby town.  The gate was lowered to stop
traffic for the rally.  He also learned that there was another rally in
a town we would have to go through the next day.  We decided leave Delhi
a day later.  So, on the 22nd, Thanksgiving in the US, we stayed in
Delhi, going to Dillihaat, a crafts exposition, to Lodi Gardens, and to
the Museum of Modern Art whose all-Indian collection was new to us.
 

On the 23rd we set off on the long trip to Ramnagar, at the eastern edge
of Corbett Park, reaching the guest house after dark.  It was set in a
large garden, and still served as the guest house for higher-ups in the
roads department that it had been since it was built by the British in
the 1930s.  Its two high-ceilinged but not very luxurious suites each
had two beds, a bath, a sitting room and some basic furniture.  The
chokidar (caretaker) brought our bucket of  hot water through an outside
bathroom door.
 

The next morning the chokidar brought our "bed tea" at 6:15.  We needed
to be up early for our tour of the park.  Tourists are not permitted to
drive their own vehicles, but must ride in open vehicles with a driver
and guide, in our case from a local hotel.  All roads into the park go
through guarded gates, and are just dirt paths with wheel ruts.  The
hope is to see a tiger, and although  we saw paw prints, and there were
several times when our guide was sure a tiger was nearby, we did not see
one.  However, we saw many other animals: barking deer, spotted deer
(cheetal), samba deer, elephants, wild boar, peacock, a fox, Siberian
cranes, eagles, hawks, and rhesus and langour monkeys.  In the Ramganga
River, which flows through the park and is dammed to make a large lake,
we saw tiger shark (a catfish), golden mahasher, black mahasher,
ghariyal crocodiles (fish-eating, with a long snout), magar crocodiles,
and huge turtles in the water and sunning themselves on logs.  Our
encounter with a herd of elephants was actually quite frightening.  They
crossed the path in front of our vehicle, and then, evidently feeling
threatened, about eight of them turned and came toward our us, trumpting
and waving their ears.  Our driver did not drive off immediately, sure
that then they would follow us if he did.  Gradually we and they backed
off and each went our own way.  Later we learned that poaching of
elephant and tiger is a big problem in the park.  Within the last year a
number of elephants had been killed. Perhaps that is why the ones we
encountered were so frightened.  A couple of days after we returned from
our trip the Times of India newspaper reported that two Nepalese men
were captured in the park with tiger traps.  These news reports really
makes us fear for the future of these beautiful animals.  By the time we
left the park it was dark, at the end of a long day with an interesting
taste of Indian wildlife.
 

The next morning we started our three day tour of the lakes: Nainital,
Bhimtal, Naukuchiyatal, and Sattal.  ("Tal" means lake.)  Nainital is
the largest and is a popular tourist resort.  All the lakes are
surrounded by mountains and are over a thousand meters above sea level.
We took advantage of nice walkways around both Nainital and Bhimtal.
Nainital has some of the old British hill station flavor.  The largest
area of flat land in town is taken up with a cricket field and
accompanying buildings.  Cricket is very popular in India, and the field
was in use the whole time we were there.  We took a walk up the hillside
and discovered that the footpaths are all brick, not like the dirt and
stone ones up the hillsides in Mussoorie.   We walked part way up the
hill, as far as a Tibetean temple, supported by the fairly large
Tibetean community in Nainital.  We rode a cable car up to a spot where
we could see snow mountians.  But we agreed that the view from our yard
in Mussoorie was better.   Bhimtal is much quieter and less popular as a
resort.  Here we visited an S.O.S. school, which educates orphans and is
supported by money from Europe.  The main building had been a summer
palace of a Punjab prince.  An architect friend of Tensing and Tsering
had converted it to classroom use, and we went to see the beautiful job
she had done with the interior of the building.  Sattal is a quiet
forest lake.  Besides a few resturants and a YMCA camp, nothing else is
on this lake.  We rented a paddle boat and took a tour around the lake,
a fitting end to our tour of these lovely mountain lakes.
 

We knew the trip home would be long, so we got a relatively early
start.  Things went fairly well until, looking at the map, we decided to
take the most direct road.  It went through Corbett Park, and seemed to
be a major road on the map we had.  It was a fine road  for about 50 km,
until the gate of the park.  Here it turned into a two track dirt road
like the others we knew from our park visit.  Tensing seemed to relish
the challenge and thought it would be an interesting drive.  Maybe he
still hoped to see a tiger.  At any rate,  we proceeded for the 50 km
drive to the other end of the park.  It was slow, bumpy and very dusty,
and took us 2.5 hours.  The only animals we saw were three large monitor
lizards (about two feet long) and a jungle fowl, the ancestor of the
domestic chicken.  Unbelievably, two buses passed us going the other
direction.  We could not imagine how they could navigate that road.
Outside the western gate we stopped to clean some of the dust from the
car  and ourselves.    Going via Kotdwar, where we stopped for some hot
chai and delicious jalabies, Haridwar and Dehra Dun, we finally reached
our house at about 9 pm.  All our bags were covered with dust and we
were very grubby.  At least there was water and the electricity to heat
it, so we each had a very welcome hot shower.
 

A week later, on December 5, several days after we hosted a Saturday
night party for 25 Mussoorie friends, we were in Tensing's fully loaded
Tata Sierra vehicle again, heading for Delhi for our return to the
U.S.   The roads in the Uttaranchal and Uttar Pradesh countryside and
towns were full of the usual mix of car, truck, oxcart, horsecart, and
pedestrian traffic, not to mention cows and monkeys waiting for
handouts.   There were many oxen and tractor-drawn wagons piled high
with sugar cane from this year's bumper crop, and we passed several
refineries with hundreds of these wagons lined up waiting to be
unloaded.  The Air France flights via Paris were fine and we arrived
home on December 6 very tired but in good shape.
 

One picture is attached, and a few others will also be visible on the
web site set up by Alex Gelman,
http://iris.nyit.edu/~agelman/weinstein.html .
 

Love,
 

Judy and Steve