Route to Gangotri The route to Gangotri starts from Rishikesh. The tremendous road building operations that have been undertaken by the government ever since the 1962 Indo-China war has meant that roads from many surrounding valleys join the Rishikesh-Gangotri route at different places.

Ganga at Rishikesh Credit: Govt of India

The route goes uphill along the Ganga River till Devaprayag. It is here that the Bhagirathi and Alaknanda streams join to assume the name Ganga.

From here, the route goes up the Bhagirathi valley up to Gangotri. The road is quite narrow at places and runs along deep valleys cut by the Bhagirathi. The road itself is rather badly maintained at many places and often a vehicle coming from the other direction means one has to stop, go back and park one's vehicle close to the mountain to let the other vehicle pass! But apart from nerve-wracking moments like this, the road to Gangotri is very beautiful. Lovely green forests complement the high snow covered peaks of Garhwal that can be viewed on the route.

At Dharali, looking over the forgotten temple. Credit: Discover India

Dharali
The route also passes through some delightful places that few people stop by. One of them is Dharali. Set in an open valley, Dharali is a place where buses stop for tea and coffee breaks enroute to Gangotri with few people stopping by. This is a fantastic place to enjoy a camping holiday. It offers lovely views of huge snow peaks all around with the Bhagirathi flowing gently past. Although lying on the Gangotri road, which gets extremely busy in summers, Dharali still remains a place relatively untouched by the machinations of man.

Nearby are the lost temples of Mukba, mentioned for the first time in the summer of 1860, by James Hulme: "At Derallee, the highest of villages on the Ganges, I found Wilson's camp. It is the nicest camp ground, with the village's noise and dust out of sight in the rear, the apricot trees forming a nice shade, with a carpet of fresh green beneath, and the river running close by. A few yards from my camp, half buried in the sands of the river, were three temples, two very small and the other with a tower about thirty feet high."

And so they remain to this day. No attempts have been made to excavate these glorious reminders of a time when Shaivism (worship of Shiva) merged with Buddhism in the land of Uttarakhand. Today, only one of these survive!