Almora, Bagheshwar and Baijnath
The drive from Nainital to Almora consists of windy hill roads with some steep hairpin turns. There was more damage on this stretch of the road from the monsoon rains than even the section from Delhi. The 54 km took almost 3 hours, not counting the stop I made at Kainchi Dham.
This is a modern temple built by followers of Baba Neem Karauli, who meditated here. The complex is fairly large and is dedicated to Hanuman. Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg spent time here, but I’m not sure that is the kind of recognition the site deserves. The priests keep the marble floors immaculate, and the mediation center looks like it is official and quite serious. Photography wasn’t allowed inside the complex, so the only photo in the gallery is from the outside.
The next stop was at the Chitai Temple, which is dedicated to the local demi-god, Lord Golu. He was a 12th c general and warlord during the Chand dynasty (11th to Gurkha takeover in 1790). Golu is considered the god of justice because, according to legend:
once a king went into the forest for hunting, when the king became thirsty he ordered one of his servants to fetch water for him. In turn the servant disturbed a female saint deep in meditation. The woman, in a fit of anger, insulted the king. The king got fond of the lady and married her. As the other queens of the king became jealous of the new queen they stole the newborn child of the queen and replaced it with a stone and threw the kid in a lake where a fisherman found him. Later when the boy realized about his true identity he decided to seek on the injustice done to his mother. He goes to the lake with a wooden horse and tries to make the horse drink water from the lake. Seeing this, the king asked the boy how he can make the wooden horse drink water at which the kid replied, if a woman can give birth to a stone then the wooden horse can drink water. The king realized his mistake and accepted him as his son. (https://www.tourmyindia.com/states/uttarakhand/chitai-temple-almora.html)
The son was Golu, who became deified for his actions as a warrior. He is one of the most popular deities in the Kumaon region. People flock to the temple offering bells and other sacrifices to support their petitions. There are temple wardens that stamp petitions from those who feel they have not gotten justice and are asking Lord Golu for help. The lines at the temple were quite long and the passageways chock full with bells. Justice comes in many forms, and it seems that those in line had high hopes of getting theirs.
Moving from justice to grace, the next temple was the Kesar Devi Temple on Crank’s Ridge. This ridge and the temple were famous in the 60s and 70s as a place where hippies would congregate. D.H. Lawrence, Timothy Leary, Lama Govinda, Bob Dylan, George Harrison etc. etc. etc. all came here seeking a spiritual experience. It wasn’t just Westerners who came either, Swami Vivekananda, Rabindranath Tagore, Ravi Shankar among other Indians spent time here as well. The temple is justifiably famous. The site has been a worship site since at least the 2nd c BCE; this is testified by a rock inscription in Brahmani script to the beautiful Goddess Kesar Devi, who was worshipped by the ancient Kassites. The temple is dedicated to the Goddess Parvati in her manifestation as Durga-Kaushiki. The book, Kumaon: Home of the Gods, explains, “According to the Puranas, to kill Shumbhu and Nishumbh (demons), Devi Parvati took the form of Kaushiki and killed them. An inscription of a stone boulder says that the temple was constructed by a king named, Rudrak. Another inscription of the 6th-7th c records that a temple by the name of Rudreshwar was also constructed. The place is known for its serenity and attracts tourists from across the globe.” (Kumaon: “Home of the Gods”, A Travelers’ Guide. New Delhi: Nest & Wings, 2018. 31.) Parvati can take many forms and one of them is Kesar Devi as protectress. Kesar is the name of the area. Not all Western tourists come to worship the Devi, many come because Kesar Devi is reputed to be one of the three places where the geomagnetic fields register the Van Allen Belts. The other two are Stonehenge and Machu Picchu. There is a sense of peace at the site, and I found that something strange was happening there. Suddenly my phone started playing music that fit with the site & I hadn’t been listening to anything. When it started playing “Silent Night,” I knew something was off. There is definitely something energetic happening on the ridge. The hotel is also on the ridge, and the wifi has distinct problems. The view, however, is fabulous.
There is a sign at the site that is just in Hindi, but it mentioned the Tibetan Book of the Dead, so I took a photo of it and later in Corbett found someone who could translate it for me. It reads:
"Kesar Devi was first known in the 1890s when Swami Vivekananda visited and meditated here. He mentioned his experience in this diary. Walter Evans Wentz, a pioneer in the study of Tibetan Buddhism, lived here for some time; he later translated The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Then in the 1930s, the Danish, mystic Sunita Baba (Alfred Sonsan) came here. Ernst Hoffmann lived here for three decades before he became the Tibetan Buddhist Lama Anagarika Govinda. Li Gautami was also here. This led to a chain of spiritual seekers from the West. In 1961, Govinda met poets Alle Ginsberg, Peter Orlowski and Gary Snyder. In later history, the area also became a part of the hippie trail at the end of the hippie movement. Crack Ridge, colloquially known as Hippie Hill, is located next to Kesar Devi and has become a popular destination."
This was the also the only place I saw other Westerners.
We also went to the Deer Park, which I would not recommend. Especially the panthers have no room to move, and the place just made me sad.
The next morning, I woke up to the sounds of Carlos Nakai’s flute, which had me quite confused. Suddenly I was transported back to Flagstaff, Arizona. At first, I thought something was going on with my phone again, but no, it really was coming from the speakers at the hotel at 7am. It just goes to show that Native American flutes fit as well in the Himalayas as they do on the San Francisco Peaks.
The clouds were quite dense when I woke up, but during breakfast they cleared for a few moments and Trisuli and Nanda Devi shone through in their glory. The last time I saw Nanda Devi, she repeatedly hid in the clouds as well, but even then, I did get lucky and was able to get a good photo of her. She is a very impressive mountain. The story goes that Nanda was a beautiful princess of the early Chand Dynasty who ran away to escape a Rohilla prince who desperately wanted to marry her. Her father refused to accept him as his son-in-law, so Rohilla started a war and won. To save herself, Nanda climbed up the sacred mountain. The mountain became known by her name as she became one with it. (My article “Open, Please: Persian & Islamic Tales of Women Rescued by Mountains,” relates similar stories from Central Asia. https://www.academia.edu/87479656/Open_Please_Persian_and_Islamic_Tales_of_Women_Rescued_byMountains) She is the patron goddess of the mountain and region and is recognized as a destroyer of evil. The mountain has two peaks along a ridgeline, the one that is higher is Nanda, and the lower eastern summit, not quite visible from Garhwal, is Sunanda, her sister. Nanda Devi is an angry goddess, which is understandable given her history, and is said to be an avatar of the Goddess Durga. There are no shrines to Hanuman on the mountain because when he was looking for herbs, he came across one in the Dunagiri Mountains that he couldn’t identify. He then broke off a piece of the mountain and carried it off with the herb to Sri Lanka without receiving permission from the Goddess. She took affront at his disrespect and announced that anyone uttering Hanuman’s name in her region would be punished. This story is the reason for my confusion in the Naini Devi Temple in Nainital.
Almora is home to one of the most famous Nanda Devi temples. It was originally constructed in the 11th c in Kumaoni-style within a preexisting Shiva temple. To get to it, we had to manage to get through town with its horrendous traffic and then find an almost non-existent parking spot. That accomplished – which took far more time than I had anticipated – we were able to start the joggle through traffic on foot through the Mall Road and then, luckily, to a pedestrian zone up a small hill to the temple. The temple is on a platform high enough that one can see beyond the houses to the surrounding hills (and, I’m guessing, mountains if the clouds had cleared). The woman caretaker was quite nice and performed a special puja for both Nanda Devi in the main temple and for Shiva in the back. From the main shrine, one exits left to circumambulate the temple and there are images of Durga, Ganesha, Krishna and Radha along the way. At the back is the site dedicated to Lord Shiva, depicted through his Shivalingum. What is really quite amazing about the Nanda Devi temple, is that it is like an oasis of peace amidst the noise, dirt, dust, traffic and mass of humanity that otherwise crowds the streets. All the reading I’ve done about Almora over the years suggested it was a beautiful serene hilltown. What perhaps used to be is now long gone. It’s now a busy congested mess, which is why the atmosphere in the temple is so doubly striking.
Bright End Corner is another overlook spot that is somewhat quieter than elsewhere, and the views are good, even with the clouds covering what should be peaks on the horizon.
There was one more stop in the Almora region that I wanted to get to, namely the Lakhudiyar Wall. This wall has Bronze Age pictographs of human figures, animals and geometric designs. I wanted to compare these figures with those I have seen and photographed in Central Asia, Pakistan, Columbia and the U.S. Southwest. The figures on this wall are reputed to be the oldest and best pictographic art in India. I found the wall to be a bit of a disappointment. There are visible figures, but not that many, and I’m not sure what some of them are. I’ve posted the human figures in the photo gallery.
As I mentioned in the previous blog, my driver, Kaptl, is not from this region and doesn’t know his way around. This presented a bit of a problem – more for him than for me – in that he didn’t realize where the Lakhudiyar Wall was. It lay in exactly the opposite direction from that where were supposed to be heading for the day, which meant we had to backtrack almost 30km. This doesn’t sound like much, but when one is driving 20km an hour, it constitutes a fair amount of time and strain on a driver’s nerves. Luckily, he did start to ask stall vendors along the road which way to go so we only had to double back once from Almora to the wall. It was different from the wall to Bageshwar. I had a very basic tourist map with me and there was no road marked that connected the valley where the wall was located with the main road to Bageshwar. As we can’t communicate, I tried to show him the map – he wasn’t using the GPS on his phone either – but he pushed it away and plowed forward. The road was small and incredibly windy. I don’t think there were more than a couple of places over the next 18 km where there was a straight line of 100m. My iWatch even peeped that my activity for the day had been completed, which it certainly had not, because of all the jostling in the car. This went on for well over an hour before he asked again for directions. We weren’t going the right way, but yes, there was a different path that might be possible. So off we went trying to find this path. Meanwhile, the main road, which is the windy one, had some of the delightful Indian highway signs that I have mentioned in earlier Indian blogs. Today’s classic was: “The road is killy, don’t be silly.” After what seemed like forever, he asked again, and sure enough we had to backtrack once more. At a curve on a fairly steep hill, was another vendor. This one was more helpful than any of the others as he not only provided information, but a guide in the form of an elderly almost toothless woman with a huge smile who wanted a lift home. This is when we started on the jeep track in a small low carriage car. We forded streams, dodged landslides, tried to avoid sink holes, and then the rain started. As I said, I was very grateful that I wasn’t driving! Our local guide helped us to keep to the right path until she was near her home, and we continued on. Luckily, it was only about another 20 minutes downhill to asphalt and another 20 to another main windy road with the above-mentioned sign. All in all, what should have taken no more than two hours took closer to five, but we made it to the Baghnath temples in Bagheshwar intact.
Bagheshwar is called “Shiva’s city. It sits at the confluence of the Gomti and Saryu rivers and was once a main trading center between Tibet and Almora. The Baghnath (Tiger Lord) temple, is right on the river and there is a large bronze painted statue of Shiva by the main bridge next to the 15th c complex. The current temple was constructed by a Chand ruler in 1450, although there are indications that there was an earlier shrine at the site. The Baghnath temple complex is just one of 15 Shiva temples in Bagheshwar, which is why it has become the goal of many Hindi pilgrims.
The rain was now coming down more forcefully, but we needed to get to the next stop the mountain top Durga temple in Baijnath, about 22 km away. The road between Bagheshwar and Baijnath is fine, not straight, but not too windy and not excessively narrow. It is always a bit nerve-wrecking when a truck or bus wants to scrape by on a one lane road with a cliff drop off on my side….
The hilltop Durga temple has been recently renovated and painted pink and white. It is spacious and quite a contrast to the earlier medieval temple complexes where the shrines are fairly close together. The view from the site is worth the trip up, even in the rain.
The last stop of the day was down in the valley at the medieval Baijnath temple complex on the river. This is the spot where Shiva is supposed to have married Parvati. The temple commemorates the occasion and includes Ganesha. The temple is dedicated to the Holy Trio. There are also a number of other shrines/temples in the complex. One that was locked up was dedicated to the Goddess Brahmani. This was perhaps the oldest of the group as it was constructed in the 9th c. The stretch between Bagheshwar and Baijnath is considered Shiva’s domain, and it does have a good feel to it. During the Katyuri Dynasty, 7th -11th c., Baijnath was its capital city. We were leaving Baijnath for Kausani at dusk, which meant that it was dark soon after leaving. We crawled the final 17 km to the hotel but arrived safely. Even if navigation isn’t Kaptl’s forte, he is a very cautious and safe driver, and I thank the deities for their help with the roads!
