Namaste!

Srinagar: While routine visitors don’t get to visit “Dachigam National Park”, we were advised to visit this park by a colleague plastic surgeon Dr. Ashok Koul who was from Kashmir, but displacaed in the 90’s. The park is not published in the tourism circuits.

Our guide (born and bought up in Srinagar) surprisingly did not know about the existence of this park. My friend, Dr. Ashok, gave me a heads-up that very few people (mostly civil servants and their families) get there as we need to seek and get special permission from forest authorities, which is difficult.  Dr. Ashok managed to get us a recommendation from a high-ranked civil servant in the govt.

Our van driver did not know the existence of a national park and his visit was for the first time.
The word Dachi-gaon stands for “ten villages” which are within this vast mountainous forest area of 150 square kilometers. Peaks with thick tall coniferous trees (some areas blocking sunlight too), rivers, streams, waterfalls, and some plains are part of the park along with the 10 villages. It’s supposedly frozen to deep snow in winter. But we were there in the best weather.
(Not our pictures)

The forest department runs ‘trout farming’ within the area. Huge trouts are scientifically grown.

Cycles are available for hire. We as a group hired a few cycles and a forest guard accompanied us as a guide.

The army provides a guide within the park. A guide is essential .. we may lose our way and it is known for wild animals and snakes

He took us all the way up the hilly region. It was strenuous and I was sweating in spite of the cold weather. (It had been years since I cycled). After reaching the top of one of the many many hills, we had a beautiful view of pristine nature. Cycling down was a most exhilarating experience. We stopped by the Dagwan river which was cold and gushing with a roar from the mountains and probably had the best water right from the stream.

Slowly and carefully balancing on rocks and boulders we enjoyed the clear water cooling our exhausted bodies.
Continued down we rode with such speed through mountain trails, we were crossing small streams and our cycles were jumping on small pebbles. And the view on either side was just unimaginably pleasant with small to wide streams with gurgling water, trees, shrubs, etc.

Our guide warned us of bear attacks and other wildlife. We did not see any but could see fresh bear droppings. Blood-stained dragging marks on the ground and blood-stained leaves, indicating a wild animal kill a pray and dragged it across the trail…
Fresh animal blood on some shrubs and leaves left us with shivers and fears

We also saw very few cottages buried deep in the forest with army guards. One of them was a Telugu man who was very very happy to meet us. He showed a cottage (far away from the fencing gate) and said it was where Ms. Indira Gandhi spent a few days after her marriage to Feroz Gandhi.

This experience of struggling to ride a bike up the hill motivated me to follow up after I go back to improve my fitness. Maybe I will take up “cycling”!!

A photo while riding down the trail almost reached the ground level from elevation. This ride down took away all the pains of climbing up and refreshed the body

Note: We met very few visitors who came to this place and most of them are high govt officials (like IAS one of them asked us, how we got permission to visit this? Probably his ego was punctured by mango-men (Aam Janata) visiting elite zones only the privileged would visit)