Rampur 11/16/07

The experience of taking the bus to Shimla, then Rampur, and up the road was pretty rough. Every bus was crowded and it was hard to figure out which bus went where. I got my first view of the Sutlej River at Rampur, where we stayed one night, and it seemed cold and foreboding. Rampur was extremely crowded due to Diwali, and we had some trouble finding a hotel room. There was dirt and rubbish everywhere and above all a throng of people in the narrow streets. Everybody was buying or selling, and the main road was crammed with vehicles and reeking of exhaust fumes. At night people were setting off Diwali explosions, and it sounded like a war zone.

The Sutlej River runs through town, but there isn't much access to it since the valley is so steep. There's a bridge connecting one side of town to the other, and a path that parallels but is quite far above the river. I could stand on the bridge, or sit on a bench near the Buddhist Temple, and look down on it, but I couldn't get to the water itself. Taking a water sample would have been out of the question even if I had the right equipment. Instead I spent time watching the water, trying to get a feel for this river, and assessing the plant and animal life. Since I don't know much about flora and fauna of India, this mostly involved photographing different plants and counting bird species. The only immediate thing I can say about that is Rampur has a strange flora -- there are a lot of Eucalyptus trees, which are definitely not native, but seem to be well established.