Kedarnath: What the Walk Up From Gaurikund Is Like

My mother had wanted to go for eleven years. She is sixty-four. In the end we went in the third week of May, which everyone in Patna told us was the right time and which turned out to be the right time for about four hours a day.

I want to write down what it was actually like. Not the darshan — you can read a hundred accounts of the darshan. The walk.

Gaurikund, 4:40 in the morning

You do not sleep much the night before. The rooms in Gaurikund are basic and cold and there is a generator somewhere. By four in the morning the lane outside is already awake: tea stalls, the smell of frying, mule handlers negotiating in loud Garhwali, and a lot of families standing in small worried clusters with their shoes in their hands.

Sixteen kilometres. That number sounds manageable when you are sitting in Bihar looking at a map. It is not a distance problem. It is an altitude problem — Gaurikund sits at around 1,980 metres and the temple at roughly 3,580, so you are climbing about 1,600 metres in a single push.

We started at 4:40 with torches. My mother had a stick. I had a bag that I repacked three times and still overpacked.

The first five kilometres lie to you

The path out of Gaurikund is wide and stone-paved and there are people everywhere, and you feel excellent. You overtake people. You think: everyone exaggerates this.

Around Jungle Chatti the crowd thins. The path narrows, the Mandakini is somewhere below and loud, and the temperature drops in a way that is hard to describe — not gradually, but in patches, as you move in and out of the shade of the gorge. You put on the jacket you were carrying and feeling smug about.

Then comes the seventh kilometre.

The seventh kilometre

This is the part nobody warns you about. Not because it is dangerous — the path is good, it is maintained, there are rest points — but because it is where the arithmetic stops working. You have walked what feels like a long way. You are not even halfway. The mules have thinned out. And the air has quietly become thinner too, so you find yourself stopping every few hundred metres for reasons you cannot quite justify.

My mother did not complain once. She stopped often, drank water, and started again. An older man from Kanpur passed us three times, because he walked faster and rested longer. Around the fourth time he passed us he said, without stopping, "Aaram se. Pahaad bhaagta nahin hai." Take it easy. The mountain isn't going anywhere.

I have thought about that sentence a lot since.

What people carry

You notice this on a long walk, because you have nothing else to do but look at other people's hands.

Women carrying steel tiffin boxes. Somebody's grandmother with a plastic bag of oranges. Men with cloth bundles on their heads. Small children being carried in baskets by porters, asleep, completely unbothered. Almost everyone has water. A surprising number of people have nothing at all, which I did not understand until later.

And a great many people carrying small paper packets from the shops at Gaurikund — coconut, red cloth, camphor, incense. There is a specific smell to those shops that I recognised immediately without ever having been there, because it is the smell of my grandmother's puja shelf in Samastipur. We make a Kedarnath stick ourselves — it is part of the temple range my family works on — and standing in that lane at five in the morning was the first time I understood properly what we had been trying to bottle. Not sandalwood. Cold stone, camphor, wet rope, smoke.

Arriving

You see the temple later than you expect. The valley opens, the last stretch flattens, and there it is — smaller than the photographs suggest, grey, absolutely solid, with the Kedarnath peak behind it doing the thing that mountains do where they refuse to look like a real object.

We reached at about 11:30. Seven hours for sixteen kilometres, which is slow, and I would do it the same way again.

Then you queue. The queue is long and it is not romantic. It moves in surges. People are tired, some are unwell, some are very emotional, and the whole thing is managed with a patience by the temple staff that I found genuinely moving.

Inside

I will not describe the inside in detail. It is a small, dark, very old space and what happens in it belongs to the people who go there.

What I will say is this: the thing that stayed with me was not the moment of darshan. It was the moment just after, standing outside in the cold with my mother, both of us not saying anything, watching a line of people who had also walked sixteen kilometres go in.

The things I would tell you if you were going

Not a list of tips. Just what I actually learned.

Go slower than you think. The people who struggled were not the unfit ones. They were the ones who went fast for the first five kilometres.

Two days is better than one. Stop overnight partway if you can. We did not, and we should have.

The temple is only open part of the year. It opens around Akshaya Tritiya and closes near Diwali; through the winter the deity is worshipped down at Ukhimath. Check the year's dates before you book anything.

The 2013 floods are still present. Not as ruins — as reconstruction, and in how people talk. The town was devastated; the temple stood. You will hear about the boulder that split the debris. Whatever you make of it, the people who live there hold that memory close, and it is worth being quiet about.

Your parents are older than you think they are. This is the real reason to go now rather than in a few years.

Afterwards

We came back down the next day, which took five hours and hurt more than the climb.

At home in Patna my mother lit a stick on the shelf where she always does, and the smell came back into the room, and she cried for about ten seconds and then went to make tea. That is the whole thing, really. You go all that way, and what you bring back is small enough to fit on a shelf.

The mountain isn't going anywhere. But you might as well go while your mother can still walk it.