Wes Anderson’s Oscar winning film, The Grand Budapest Hotel, was the unlikely source that ultimately led me to Barot, a small place in the Mandi district of Himachal Pradesh.
I loved the film, especially the painting-like visuals that went a long way in making it a sweet and quirky tale. And it was the funicular that took the visitors up the hill to the Grand Budapest Hotel in the film that jogged my memory.
I remembered what my father and his friends used to talk about when I was in school – a trolley that took people from Jogindernagar to Barot over a hill. As I watched the film, I imagined it would have been something like the funicular featured there, though not so ostentatious. Naturally, a visit to Barot leapfrogged on my list of to-go places to hover somewhere near the top!
Barot was the biggest village in the relatively less-visited Chuhar Valley, amidst the Dhauladhar range. The valley region carved by the Uhl River was also called the Chota Bhangal area – Bara Bhangal consists of one village in the higher reaches of Dhauladhar range and one has to trek to reach there.
As I started planning for a trip to Barot, I was flummoxed as to why I had not done so till now. Barot had everything going for it – it lay just about four hours from my village in Kangra Valley, it had an intriguing ‘how-to-reach’ facet to it and one that I had heard innumerable times, and, to top it all, the Barot that was described to me was an incredibly beautiful place.
However, fired up now, I looked for an opportunity to make amends. It came soon enough. Some work came up in May in Pathiar, my village, and without much ado I included a visit to Barot in my schedule and roped in a friend to accompany me. The visit though started on a discouraging note.
The ‘trolley’, or the haulage car as it was officially called, was stopped in 2006. Instead of a 12 kilometre long adventure, Barot now could be approached through a usual 40-km road journey from Jogindernagar. On the positive side though, the track could still be seen near Barot. Starting from Pathiar, it meant that we would be covering an extra 40 km to Jogindernagar via Palampur and Baijnath, home to a 13th century Shiva temple.
Fields give way to a thick cedar forest as one drives from Ghatasani to Jhatingiri
It was about 3 in the evening when we started from Pathiar. By the time we reached Baijnath, it was 4.30 pm. As we were going for the first time to Barot and had no idea of where we’ll be staying, we wanted to reach before it was dark. From near the temple, we hired a taxi to Barot for `1,200. Soon after we crossed the Shanan hydel power station at Jogindernagar – the raison d’être for Barot’s importance – and in about an hour were at Ghatasani, the village on the Pathankot-Mandi Highway from where a narrow road forked out to Barot, 25 kilometres away.
Without respite, the road went uphill for the next six kilometres, a couple of kilometres twisting and turning through fields before entering a thick cedar and oak forest till we reached the top of the ridge at Jhatingiri, comprising about a dozen houses.
Jhatingiri could be a destination in itself. It had a quiet that reeked of the past. The gnarled oaks and the uppity cedars, with a few rhododendron trees and couple of meadows thrown in for effect, were from an age that for us humans exist only in history.
Majority of these trees were over a century old – cedars live more than 200 years generally – and they, alongwith the quaint wooden houses, spoke in whispers of times gone by. Jhatingiri had an ephemeral past too – it was the summer retreat of the Mandi royals.
Though some websites mentioned the ruins of the royal castle, we could find no clue to it when we went looking for it on our way back. We asked a group of locals playing volleyball on a small clearing in the forest.
“There used to be some stones that were in the jungles, but now nothing much is there,” one of them explained to us. Apart from the forest, the oldest thing here was a forest rest house that dated back to the early 20th century.
From Jhatingiri, the road descended 12 kilometres to touch the Uhl River at Tikkan. We crossed the river and then on for the last seven km went along its left bank till we reached Barot at around 6.30 pm. We had reached just in time, at twilight.
As we saw no hotels or guesthouse signboards at what serves as the bus station, we enquired about a place to stop at a shop.
The shopkeeper, a young boy, was most helpful. He called up a number and then told us that the owner would soon come to pick us up.
The owner was Amichand Thakur, and he drove the last 5 minutes to his River View Guesthouse on the other side of the Uhl River.
The room was clean and airy, and a steal at `500 a night. The balcony ran across four rooms on the floor and overlooked the river.
Next to it was a large house, built in a traditional-style slate roof, walls made of huge beams of wood alternating with sections of stone, a covered balcony all around the first floor and a big courtyard in front. An old lady sat there surrounded by a cackle of hens.
It was a scene that got imprinted in my mind and played numerous times in front of my eyes as I went to sleep. The morning brought to light a heartwarming vista. The river threaded through the habitation nestling at the base of the valley, with mountainsides draped in a thick cedar cover.
Barot reminded me of Pahalgam as it was in the 1980s. The width of the river in front of our guesthouse was about 100 metres and there was a small island in between. Small wooden bridges crossed over the river channels and connected, we came to know, two districts of Himachal Pradesh. We were in Kangra district and across the river was Mandi district.
The route of the trolley, or the haulage-way trolley as it was called, lay fully in Kangra district. Though the service had been stopped nearly a decade ago, the track could still be seen. And that was where we headed out to after breakfast.
The track was about a kilometre-and-a-half upstream. A dirt road led to it through some old houses that soon gave way to fields. Midway, on the river side was the trout camp. Over the last few years, Barot has turned into an attractive destination for anglers, since the clear waters of the Uhl Rriver are great for trout fishing.
During the trout season – November 1-February 28 – you can register at the Trout Farm Office and get a license for `100 a day. But there are some conditions – the license allows you to catch only six trout a day using only artificial bait and the fish must not be smaller than 40 cm. If the size is smaller, you have to release the fish back in the river.
Just a short walk later, we came across a bridge on a small stream coming down the mountainside to meet the Uhl. On the other side was what once was the last stop of the trolley from Jogindernagar.
One look at the track and my jaw dropped – the track, like rails of a train, plunged down straight from the top of the mountain at almost an awe-inspiring incline. It was an incline on which an SUV could not climb for more than 100 metres.
These tracks were coming from Jogindernagar on the other side of the mountain at an altitude of 4,300 feet. The trolley was pulled using cable wires and climbed up to Head Gear, its highest point at 8,300 feet, via Winch Camp at 8,000 feet. From Head Gear, the rails descended vertically to reach Barot, at over 6,000 feet, where the reservoir for the hydel station was constructed.
The 110-watt hydel project, envisaged in 1925, was a result of an agreement between Col Battye, the then Chief Engineer of Government of Punjab, and Joginder Sen Bahadur, the king of Mandi. It was commissioned in 1932 and was officially opened on March 10, 1933.
The reservoir built for Shanan hydel power station was half-a-kilometre downstream of where we were staying. Interestingly, the power station was under the Punjab Electricity Board, an island of an area in Himachal Pradesh operated by a neighbouring State whose border was over 150 kilometres away – an administrative quirk in place over 40 years after Himachal Pradesh became the 18th State of the country in 1971!
As we walked back towards the reservoir, we decided to hire a cab for the rest of the day that would take us 16 kilometres up to Baragaran (literally, ‘large village’), the last village in the Chhota Bhangal area, and then drop us to Baijnath from where we were planning to catch the night bus back to Delhi. We hired Nagendra, just out of college, who showed us around. He first took us to the reservoir. There we saw a group of visitors excitedly clicking pictures near a free-standing pipe.
Water gushed out at intervals with great force from the top. The pipe was standing at the initial point from where Uhl water was tunnelled through pipes over several kilometres to Jogindernagar. It was the force of the water that resulted in fountains coming out of the pipe, which acted as a sort of stressbuster!
Just opposite this unique sight, about 100 metres up on the hill, was another facet unique to Chuhar Valley. It was the temple of Pashakot devta, a local god for rain. This is where Nagendra took us next. The path went through a thick forest till it reached a gate leading to two slate-roofed rooms built of mud and stone. These rooms were the house of the reigning god of the valley.
A huge cedar tree with its forked trunk sheltered the temples. Adorned with a number of red flags, the temple entrance – a yellow painted door with six snakes etched on the upper section – was also adorned with Bharal horns. The look and feel were distinctly tribal! As the priest had gone out on some work, the temple was locked and we could not see the idol, which, we were told, was made of wood.
Before driving towards Baragaran, we decided to buy the local rajmah (kidney beans) to take back home. “Our rajmah is very tasty,” Nagendra said, and it was this statement of his that had been the reason for our decision. He took us to a shop where there were six kinds of rajmah – blood red, spotted red, yellow, white, black with small white spots and the usual light red in colour.
This was the first time I had seen rajmah in so many shades and colours. Amongst the two of us, we bought a kilogramme of every variety – each of them turned out to be extremely tasty, with each having a different flavour.
On the way to Baragaran, just about three kilometres from Barot, was a beautiful waterfall on the side of the road. The water cascaded about 40-50 feet down in numerous streams and formed a small rainbow at the base.
We spent some time there, soaking ourselves in the gentle spray that came with the wind, looking at the curve the Uhl River was making down in the valley. We left only when a gaddi came down the road with his goats. It took some time to negotiate our car through the herd, which moved as if it was the lord of the region. The road twisted and turned up the valley along the Uhl, which receded in size as we climbed up.
It came to an end at Baragaran, which truly was a large village. It was the starting point for the trek to Billing, the paragliding destination, now internationally renowned. Nagendra told us that work was going on to link Baragaran with Billing via road. When that happens, the distance to Barot will be cut in half for those coming from Kangra.
We sat down on the side of the road covered in grass, high above Uhl which looked like a turquoise thread lying on the valley floor. I could have spent hours sitting here looking at the picturesque landscape.
But it was time to return as it was late afternoon. As our taxi negotiated the narrow road through wheat fields in the lower part of the valley, another vista opened up. It was like a bonus at the end of the trip – the evening sunset the yellowing grain ablaze.
The steps cut into the mountainside took on a golden hue and at places it looked like bales of gold had been laid immaculately, one on top of another. And at that moment, the trip came a full a circle, for the scene in front of me looked exactly like a painted sequence from The Grand Budapest Hotel.
