Woke up by a shivering Martin and the bed is literally shaking, it doesn’t take long before I realize how cold it really is and for every exhale a big white cloud is formed in the air. We thought that we were smart when we booked a hotel with central heating but of course, we didn’t count the numerous number of power failures. Once we looked outside we we knew what caused the shortage of power and yesterdays heavy snowing was now up towards 2m of new, fresh powder snow and you couldn’t find any trace of our activities yesterday, not even our newly built kicker.
Because of the heavy snowfall yesterday the gondola was closed today so we rented a local guide and went for some forest skiing from Gulmarg, down the mountain towards Tenmarg. At some parts it was really steep and tight forest but most of the parts it was just perfect and with all new fresh snow it was like heaven. Once you arrived to Tenmarg the taxi drivers more or less were waiting to drive you up to Gulmarg again. Maybe not the most environment friendly way of skiing but totally worth it, our guide showed us everything from narrow corridors, wide open spaces and tight forest skiing and in true Indian style some people had to sit on the roof on the taxi ride back.
Tenmarg was a pretty tiny typical mountain village, they had an supermarket, a mosque, some other stores and the whole village was hidden in a huge cloud of hashish and diesel exhausts. Pretty different to what you are used you to but the people were friendly, the tea was nice and they had a really smart solution to the problems with stray dogs; “Not many stray dogs here, the black tigers eat them”. After some thinking and discussion we think they are talking about panther but we are nor sure, they may speak english here but its not that easy to understand.
“This is a great place because no one is here”
-Seth Morrison