Chalnichina - Serenity On The Slope

The pandemic has made Shikha Tripathi discover obscure destinations within driving distance of her home town, Nainital, with two unlikely travel companions: her parents. A road trip to Chalnichina in Uttarakhand holds a mountain of revelations for the family, about the place and one another.

- Shikha Tripathi

A plate of sweetmeats is doing the rounds, and when it stops at me, I struggle to choose between bal mithai and singhori. “You can have both,” says Shivraj Singh merrily, but I don’t want to overstep his wife’s hospitality. I go for the malu leaf wrapped goodness of the regional milk sweet, singhori, and down it with a glass of crisp spring water, as cool to the throat as the sight of the balmy Himalayas is to my eyes. My parents make a healthier choice—a piece of jaggery to go with their tea. While they marvel at the mountainous expanse beyond, I marvel at how this trip to Chalnichina came to be.

Despite having grown up in the Kumaon Himalayas of Uttarakhand, I’ve never been to this part of my backyard. But the pandemic has been full of surprises; it fuelled the rediscovery of my roots, and shaped my travels in a way that I started taking the detours I never took, making pit stops that were never on my bucket list. It also gave me a new set of cohorts, my folks whom I would have never otherwise chosen to hit the road with, or expected to metamorphose into ideal travel companions. When Chalnichina was bookmarked, I had to look it up on the map to see exactly where it was. Beyond Dhaulchina but before turning for Mukteshwar, near Lamgarha but not quite, and somewhere off the road to Pithoragarh, is how I finally placed it. With our woollens packed for the looks-like-spring-but-feels like-winter weather, we set off on the three-hour journey from Nainital.