Tehri Dam

I went to Tehri Dam yesterday, one of the worlds highest dams.  I knew there was not going to be much to see there, but I had read about it back when my Honors Project was going to be about rivers, so I felt that being so close I just had to see it in person. 

It is about 2.5 hours away, and once we finally got there we couldn’t get “permission” to get onto the actual dam and get in.  We weren’t sure why, and our driver told us that they weren’t letting Indians in either, probably something to do with the recent Mumbai attacks.  So we had to view it from afar, which ended up being fine.  I just wanted to see it. I took some great photos as well.  We ended up driving around a bit to get some different views.  We stopped for chai when we first got there and talked with this shopkeeper who pulled out a book that he had pasted a bunch of photos and postcards in.  There were before and after pictures of Tehri.  It was so sad to see it; they dam had caused the relocation of over 90 villages, which translates to hundreds of thousands of people.  They were moved to “New Tehri” which he motioned was up the mountain a bit further.  Apparently when the water was clearer a few years ago you could still see bits of the city underneath the water.  One of my teachers also told me that the clock-tower from Tehri used to be visible from above through the water.  It made me sad to look at it, but it was hard not to be amazed at the magnitude of one of the world’s highest dams. 

On the way home we stopped at a famous Hindu temple, it was a 3 km hike up to it, and it was straight up, but we did it anyways.  We hadn’t eaten anything and it was raining, but it was a nice hike up and the temple at the top was not much, but still beautiful. We went from there to an Eco Park, which was again nothing special, just some trees with signs and postings encouraging everyone to love Mother Earth.

It was a relief to get out of Mussoorie, if only for a day.  I have been here for almost 5 weeks and have yet to take a weekend trip or anything, while all my friends are traveling all over.  There are going to places like Jaipur, Amritsar, and Manali.  All places I have been, and all places I will be going in a few weeks. So for now I am sticking to day trips, which are nice.  Only a few more weeks here before I am (as of now) off to Bangalore.  Internet still too slow to more pictures up...