Travelling

Travelling is a lifestyle which many people enjoy.  I too enjoyed travelling when I was a child.  My childhood memories are of a newly independent India in the fifties.  My father's work included a lot of travel because he was the divisional forest officer in the government of Punjab and later the newly formed Himachal Pradesh.  Sometimes, when my siblings and I were very young, we travelled with him into the interior forests of what is now Himachal Pradesh.  Mountain travel can be a dizzy experience if you are not used to it, especially the Himlayan mountains which are rugged and huge.  The roads are carved on the sheer hillside, sometimes not very firm and prone to landslides in the rainy weather, and there is a complete drop on the outer side of the road which goes into a gorge.  At times, you come across breathtaking landscapes, whether dales in a tranquil forest or the grandeur of the mountain peaks - one is speechless with delight!

Lilies in the Field

The memories are of an innocent era....my father, the driver and a forest official in the front of the jeep; my mother and my siblings in the back...because we were so many (five - three sisters and two brothers), there was a spillover into the projection of the jeep in the rear. Jeeps were originally military vehicles and the term was coined by US military mechanics, based on E. C. Segar's 'Eugene the Jeep', Popeye's jungle pet which was "small, able to move between dimensions and could solve seemingly impossible problems." CJ was civilian jeeps and the variant used by the forest department in the 1950s and 60s was the Willys CJ 3B.

The Willys Jeep

So, along with all the stuff, we would be stuffed too, like a tin of sardines, inside the jeep. In the beginning we had to contend with travel sickness, some of us, but soon got over it! We would just enjoy the beauty of nature, sometimes sing songs like "Joog, joog, joog, off to Chandigarh now we go!"; Another song
"My Uncle Sam was a very funny man, he washed his face in a frying pan! 
He combed his hair with a horse's tail & scratched his belly with a big toenail.  
So how I laughed ahaha (3) just at the break of day.  
I took my wife to the tailor's shop, to make her mouth bit smaller! 
My pretty little wife, she opened up her mouth and swallowed up the tailor!  
So how I laughed ahaha.....  
One fine morning, in the middle of the night, two dead dogs began to fight, 
A paralyzed donkey passing by, he kicked the blind man in his eye!  
So how I laughed ahaha...."
And "It's a long road to freedom"; "Pearly Shells"; "My Bonny lies over the ocean". Sometimes we would race with other cars on the road, though there were hardly that many on the roads then!  I remember the time when we would get to eat lush, juicy cherries and all kinds of berries  and my parents introduced us to persimmons, a fruit we hadn't had before.  Once, between Manali and Katrain, we stopped at the home of a butterfly collector who had the most beautiful collection of butterflies in his home.

Our childhood heroes in those days used to be drivers of the Willys jeep, like Jhabay Ram who used to drive so intrepidly, going through terrain which was difficult to traverse....one time he himself laid logs across a flowing stream, so the jeep would get to the other side slowly but surely!  Another time Nageshwar was taking us in a wild forest area near Daltonganj then in Bihar but now in Jharkand.  It was night time and we saw a pack of wild elephants running towards us trumpeting menacingly.  Nageshwar turned the jeep around in the narrow dirt track and we retreated by the skin of our teeth.  The next morning the newspapers reported of the wild elephants on the rampage who had run amok killing people!

Snow Peaked Mountains

We would travel to Delhi too, mostly during our three month school vacation between December and early March.  We would get to see the Republic Day parade and the Beating Retreat, in those days when there weren't televisions, just the radio commentaries.

Last year I had to travel a lot, we shifted from Hyderabad to Bangalore, then the trips to Chennai and later to Bhubaneswar to meet my daughter, then the several trips to Chandigarh as we had to renovate our house there.  It was just travel, travel, travel!  It was a joy to travel from Hyderabad to Bangalore by road - a great road. The air travel has become quick but tedious, what with the waits in the airports, changing aircrafts and sometimes the terminal, and of course the trip to the airports because now the airports have moved more than an hour away from the city.

There's lots of travelling to do in India itself...I look forward to trips to Coorg and the Nilgiris, which I haven't explored much.  I still enjoy traveling! I believe that the Lord keeps my going out and my coming in and commands His angels concerning me to guard me in all my ways!