Walking in The Woods

Perhaps the best part of our recent visit to Chail in Himachal Pradesh was the long walks in the woods. As I mentioned in a previous post, most roads in Chail were surrounded on both sides by verdant slopes populated with tall Deodar trees and thick shrubbery below. Being monsoon season, the sky was mostly overcast, and when the sun peeped out of the clouds, not much sunlight reached the road, filtered as it was by the tall trees. 

Except for the main Chail-Kufri road, passing through the centre of town, there was not much vehicular traffic on any of the streets. There were not many pedestrians either. So, my father and I mostly had the road to ourselves and enjoyed the clean mountain air and the serenity of the place while out and about, whether walking to the local Gurdwara, the former cricket ground or the elusive wildlife sanctuary (Google Maps showed there was one but we could not find it. We later learnt it had been de-notified.). 

We often heard birds singing, which soothed our ears. It was a treat to watch monkeys swinging among tree branches or sitting on the ground and plucking the leaves of certain plants to eat. They did not pay much attention to us as we walked by, sometimes even when a few of them were resting on the roadside as we passed them. 

During our long walks, I took several pictures, including those of some wildflowers growing by the roadside or on the slopes.

When we walked past the Chail Palace on the Chail-Kufri road one day, away from the centre of town, we came upon an interesting sight about a kilometre from the palace. In a clearing on our right side, several stones piled upon one another formed a circle. It was grown over with bushes and plants, and it was hard to see what was inside. It was surrounded by another circle where the ground had been dug to a level a few inches lower than the area around it. We felt a draught of wind as we stood there, probably because of its location among the surrounding hills. My father and I surmised that the circle of stones may have contained a fountain or something of the sort built by the erstwhile Maharaja of Patiala.

A gentleman who owned a homestay and restaurant in the centre of town and was an old-timer told us that the total population of Chail had not changed much since the Maharaja developed it in the early 1900s. Most people, he said, were engaged in horticulture or running homestays. That may have been why there had been no rampant deforestation as in other hill stations such as Shimla. Another reason may have been that the place was not as high on the priority list of tourists as others. I did see an advertisement for a new apartment complex being developed at Chail on our way back to Kalka, though, and wondered what the future would hold for the place.