Picture Palace - Mussoorie

Yet again we decided to visit Mussoorie in the mountains. We left from Gurgaon in the afternoon on Saturday the fifth of October, broke the journey in Ghaziabad (at my inlaws who were accompanying us) and then continued to Mussoorie at 6:30 a.m. on Sunday the sixth. It was a round trip of 640 kilometres and although on the fifth we had no problems with the journey, the return journey on the 8th proved nightmarish as it took us one hour and nineteen minutes to cover a 16 kilometres stretch from Modinager to Rajnagar Extension in Ghaziabad. We hit Modinagar at about 6:30 p.m. and reached Ghaziabad at 7:45 p.m. I have snipped a part of the route and pasted it below. The journey to Mussoorie is on the whole pleasant with spells of highways where you can cruise along, but then the numerous "diversions" and rough patches do intrude into your journey. Another major issue on this highway (Raj-Nagar, Meerut by-pass, Muzaffarnagar-Saharanpur) is that there are numerous cuts from which tractors and slow-moving vehicles intrude. In many cases, you have trucks hogging the right lane preventing you from overtaking them.

While travelling to Mussoorie from Delhi, one must stop at the midway point at Mansurpur. One can relax, visit the washroom, have a great breakfast or perhaps even shop for ethnic stuff. Macdonalds and Haldiram have their outlets here.

This time when we'd decided to visit Mussoorie it simply to relax and chill out, and chill out we sure did, what with clouds literally pouring in so that the temperature dropped sharply and we were left grabbing for our jackets and sweaters! 

This time we stayed at a hotel near Picture Palace and the scenery was simply amazing! One could see the valley before us and Dehradun out in the distance ensconced by a ring of mountains. The lights in the night were simply mesmerising!

While no doubt, there are numerous spots to visit in Mussoorie, we, however, decided to forgo them for the main reason that parking our cars at the hotel parking lot and then taking them out once again was too difficult a task. We decided to just roam around the city enjoying the scenic views, window-shopping on Mall road having Butter-chicken at My Home and  South-Indian at Udupi.

A family of monkeys drew my attention and I just stood there clicking at them. There was something rather human about the mother holding her child while the child looked at her.

An unguarded basket of cucumber and carrots lay on the side of the road awaiting its consumers while the monkeys waited for the rest of the gang to join them. Mussoorie has a rather laid back easy-going atmosphere about it which turns into a frenzy during the peak months of May and June when the traffic jams and the crowd becomes really difficult to handle!

While there might not be much to buy from the shops on Mall road, the bits and pieces of trinkets and so-called souvenirs might draw your attention. The Cooperative shops and organic shops, however, do sell organic honey which I usually buy along with a bottle of Noni juice.

My experiments with slow exposure gave me a few interesting results, but then I guess light pollution is the greatest problem. It, however, looks simply amazing looking down towards Dehradun on a clear night with the lights twinkling in the distance.