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My Mother Hiked the Himalayas
And drank from the source of the Ganges
The other day I was chatting with my mother.
We were having pancakes for breakfast — a special treat. The talk turned to how my parents used to love to go for pancakes and how they used to get real maple syrup.
That sparked another memory for her.
“When we were hiking in the Himalayas, we saw men tapping the trees there and the maple syrup dripping in the buckets,” she told me.
I was astonished. I had never thought of maple trees in India. I was also reminded that my mother had gone hiking in the Himalayas about 60 years ago.
My mother was in her 20s when she went with her parents and younger sister for a hike up to the origins of the Ganges River, a site that my Mom refers to as both Gaumukh and Gangotri. Doing a little digging, I discovered that the first is the name of the actual origin of the source stream while Gangotri and Khatilang are the names of the two glaciers that feed the stream.
My mother has many stories about her trip.
She and her family hiked up to an elevation of over 11,000 feet without any of the modern equipment we take for granted. They were Indians who had lived much of their lives in Bombay (now Mumbai). So they weren’t used…
