Semkherk to Kaliaghat

We woke up at around 6am and got ready for the day. Immediately, we came out to see the two peaks of Trishul as the morning was quite clear. After a while, I felt somewhat irritated as I was feeling very cold and my jacket was not a sufficient protection for such kind of cold weather. I was missing our Kal-matiya trip where instead of being very cold we were very cozy and comfortable. After talking to Sandeep, I agreed with his point of view wherein he told me about outdoors and how in outdoors one learns to survive without those things, which make one cozy and learns to enjoy the beauty of nature. I decided to follow this advice from that day.

From this campsite we started at around 8am and initially we went down, down and down. Sandeep was not very comfortable while descending down. I was little bit worried for him. He also bent his ankle while descending and hence John gave him his walking stick after which he was much better at descending.

We went through one village called Jhinjhi. This was the last village we would go through for the rest of the trip.



We saw flock of sheep and one amazing scene where one of the sheep gave birth to a lamb while on the street, just amazing.


There was a small school in Jinjhi where there was only one teacher and around 25 students. Half of the students were in school uniform and half were in normal dress. They were singing the national anthem. After seeing that school I could not stop myself from thinking about my childhood school “Shaskiya bal mandir”.



After passing the village, the difficult part of the day started. We had to cross a big mountain at straight 40-degree angle and in that too in the blazing sun. It was really a difficult climb. Before this we had to cross the Birehi river over a hanging bridge.


After about 3 hrs we reached the top and had our lunch. From this point our campsite was a 3 hour walk.. Now the trail was not that much difficult however the climb was still an quite steep. we were going to camp at a meadow called Kaliaghat above the village of Pana. The campsite was at a height of 2600 mts. We would have walked around 18 kms today.

The night was horribly cold. Even the ever friendly campfire was not keeping us warm today. The food was excellent as usual. Arvind told us, we had long day after this one.

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