Are you going to Naldehra? Beware, it’s a dunghill
“Crowned by a beautiful grove of deodars Naldera is carpeted with a fine springing turf and used to be a favourite camping ground of Lord Lytton’s. Lord Lansdowne made more than one visit to the spot, and Lord Curzon with his family has regularly proceeded there for several weeks in June during the last few years.”
It’s a description from 1904, and when I rode through this village 22km outside Shimla in September of 2000, I agreed wholeheartedly with it. Four years later, on June 30, 2004, it seemed busier at the height of the tourist season, but I still liked it very much, and the memory endured. So, last week, after an interval of 12 years, I went back to spend two nights in Naldehra with my wife and son. It turned out to be a mistake.
Naldehra wasn’t at all the place I had in mind. The two days hung heavy on our hands, and all the time we wanted to be somewhere else. The “grove of deodars” was there right above us. We only had to step out of our room to walk into it, but we didn’t because the entire trail was covered with horse manure.
From about 10am, a train of ponies starts winding up the trail that begins just outside the gate of Himachal Tourism’s Hotel Golf Glade. I didn’t count the ponies and their grooms, but there must be well over a hundred. A ride is always available, although tourists from Shimla arrive by the minute.
The wide road gets choked as cars and vans park on the shoulders on both sides. There isn’t an inch of clean road to step on. Dung everywhere. Balls of glistening, fresh brown dung; a patina of squashed and dried dung. Undigested hay flies about with every gust of wind and the sweep of a passing vehicle. When it rains, the roadside trenches run brown with dung.
Naldehra today is a dunghill. Think about it, that dung, powdered by passing wheels, floats in the air you breathe and settles on your skin and tables, and in the plates and glasses of the restaurant nearby (by the first afternoon I was sniffling, not from the cold air but an allergy to the dust). There is an overwhelming stench everywhere.
We arrived in Naldehra very early to beat the Shimla rush hour. Check-in was at 12 noon, so leaving our luggage in the car we walked up the trail anyway. We had to pick our way through the gaps in the dung. Clean gaps were rare so we made a concession to dried dung.
There’s a Rs 10 entry charge for the trail, and pedestrians also need to pay. As a joke, perhaps, Himachal Tourism has hung up banners on the importance of cleanliness on the wire fencing of the adjoining golf course that does not welcome sauntering tourists.
When I first came to Naldehra, tourists were few, the roadside market further down the road did not exist, the hillside was not covered with houses, the Shimla road cut through the golf course and ponies were mercifully few. They seemed like a welcome diversion rather than a nuisance.
In 2000, Himachal Tourism’s Golf Glade hotel and restaurant stood a little way down the hill. The hotel with a sloping tin roof looked like a repurposed British dak bungalow which it might be. Those rooms are still let but the old restaurant is shuttered. The one in use now is part of the new hotel block where we stayed this time.
The new block is an improvement over most other Himachal Tourism hotels because it has wooden flooring rather than carpeting. Himachal Tourism’s room carpets are notoriously dirty and in a place layered with dung they would only incubate an epidemic. The new rooms also have LED TVs with Tata Sky boxes; the mattresses and pillows are better and the bathroom fixtures modern. But there was no joy in staying in a better furnished property when we couldn’t step out.
On our morning walk, we reached a clearing that’s called Picnic Spot and which the pony grooms sell to their customers as the location for the song Chappa Chappa from Maachis. I saw the video and it seems like a fable to me, but reviewers go back and peddle this lie online. A lot of deodar trees have been felled there. You can count the stumps. You get overpriced soft drinks and chips there. It’s remarkable how people who have breakfasted at the restaurant below feel obliged to munch chips and drink a cola just 200 yards above. It’s added cruelty to the ponies.
A private party now runs a few adventure activities in the clearing that seem dangerous, and I doubt if they have any safety monitoring or clearance.
Nature made Naldehra beautiful. When you climb up to the top of the hill and look around at the tall deodars you can feel that. The cold air of the place on a bright June morning would be called salubrious. But there’s the racket of tourists a few metres away. The clearing is very noisy.
We continued on the trail and soon it was only wide enough for one pony or person to pass. Ponies — read commerce — had right of way. When we heard them coming, we quickly found a place to stand aside. The animals are docile but their masters and riders are pushy.
The view is great. There’s even a small temple on the way, and a rock that you can rest on where the path opens up for a moment. But then the ruts made by passing hooves on that one-horse trail are so full of dung that our joy was short-lived. We somehow stumbled out of the wood on to the road and started walking down to the hotel.
We had finished doing all that there was to do in Naldehra even before we had checked in. Had the path been clean we would have loved to go again, but once inside our room we didn’t want to go out unless it was inside a car. Outside our balcony window all we saw was tourists on ponies, and monkeys. There was a whole colony of simians around the hotel thanks to the litter that tourists leave behind.
Dung, noise, stench, monkeys, and a relentless train of tourists from 10am to 7pm. That’s Naldehra of the tourist season for you.
While we were there, most of Himachal Tourism’s log huts were unoccupied. I think this myopic business model isn’t working for them too. Wouldn’t it be much better to pedestrianise the trail, and promote Naldehra as a healthful place, which is what brought the lat sahibs to it in the first place?
