A visit to Tapkeshwar temple
I had decided to take the day off from travelling in order to recuperate for the upcoming trek. Still, I couldn’t let myself from venturing out to Tapkeshwar temple—the other place mentioned in the Lonely Planet guide. One good thing about Dehradun was that most of the important places were connected via shared autos and for just five or ten rupees, it was possible to get from one place to another.
A Vikram till Ballupur Chowk followed by another till Garhi dropped me at the entrance to the temple area. The temple was still a kilometre away. After a few minutes of walking through a planned residential layout, I was at the flight of stairs that descended to the temple.
The temple had been modernised and upgraded from the original cave that it once used to be. (Legend says that Dronacharya used to meditate here.) As such, it had lost quite a bit of its charm with it polish and paint. There were quite a few Bengali groups who roamed around and created a lot of ruckus. After spending a few minutes inside the complex, I walked back to Garhi auto stand.
Asan river flowing through the temple complex. Back and right – the cave complex that housed some old and some new idols., with its star attraction being a Shiva face made of seeds of rudraksha. Left visible – temple dedicated to Vaishno devi.
By noon, I was back in the hotel and did not venture out other than to have some dal and roti at night. I shaved off my stubble, took a bath and rearranged the contents of my rucksack into three categories—the clothes that I had soiled in the last two weeks, the clothing and equipment I would be carrying for my trek and a set of clean clothes and some stuff (like my personal sleeping bag, books, etc.) that I wouldn’t need until the trek was over.
A funny looking television set
The room that I was given at Hotel Aparajita had the funniest looking television set. It was all taped up. The speaker grill was also broken. Some technician had bored one of sides to make way for the AV RCA connectors. The set top box had Tata Sky embossed on the top but was actually operated by some DVB company—the branding of which was done right below the Tata Sky logo with the words ‘Digital High Technology’ written underneath. The television set still worked! That was some high technology indeed.
Maybe it had spent its youth posing as a prop for fight sequences in movies.
I watched three back-to-back Telugu movies dubbed in Hindi to help pass time.