Uttarakhand is known as “the land of the gods" (Devbhumi) and hence a lot of pilgrimages in its region. Also, there are a lot of educational institutes, universities, colleges & schools are situated there. While studying in one of the universities (University of Petroleum & Energy Studies, Dehradun) I have been exploring a lot place. The surprise happens when you get a call from your grandparents for a visit to a place nearby where you are studying, and you never know this can turn out to be fun as well.
While studying in Dehradun away from family, meeting your family members and staying with them is always missed. My Grandparents, aged 70 and above, they were visiting Haridwar as a usual travel as they like to visits pilgrimages at this age. I visited them by reaching Haridwar in a shared bolero taxi which run between Haridwar, Rishikesh & Dehradun. Distance between my hostel in Dehradun and Haridwar is approx. 70Km and travel time of 2 hours.
Haridwar is famous for kachori, cholley bhature and the aarti which happens daily in the evening. First day on reaching there we had our lunch on the sides of ganga and we waited at the ghat for the sunset so that we can have the view of the aarti. Aarti takes about an hour of to be completed, it is the most mesmerizing thing to watch at a holy place. The crowd comes at least 45-60 mins before the start of aarti at Har Ki Pauri (banks of river ganga), so that they can have a place to sit and have a full view of the aarti. After the aarti, we went to have dinner at one of the vaishno dhaba in the main market. One of the thing which you should never miss is the “Hot Kesar Milk”, it is available at almost every dhaba.
Next day, we planned to visit Mansa devi temple, it is situated at a hill top. There are 2 ways to reach there, 1. By climbing stairs & 2. By the roopway. So, we travelled there via roopway, while having the complete view of Haridwar as we were reaching to the top. The view from the top is awesome. There was an incident which happened as we stepped out of mandir; my grandmother was holding prasad and suddenly a monkey came from the back and snatched the prasad from her hand. My grandfather, fearlessly, goes toward the monkey and offers a toffee to him. The moment that monkey tried to take the toffee from his hand, he snatched back the prasad from the monkey. This was the best part of the entire trip, the monkey was so dishearten that he lost the prasad and also didn’t get the toffee.
By the evening we returned back to hotel, packed our bags. They took their train from Haridwar to Delhi and I took the bolero taxi to reach back to Dehradun. Memories spent with your grandparents are always cherishing, because when we lose them, these memories stays with us forever.1
