Place to see: Har Ki Dun, Mussoorie, India

About this place:

Eleven years later, I was revisiting Har Ki Dun, which literally translates to Shiva’s valley, and which is tucked away about 12,000 feet above sea level near the border of Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh. I had changed, India had changed (and how!), and I wondered what had changed in Seema, the last village 7.5 miles before Har Ki Dun, where I had struggled to explain what a telephone is to Irbir Singh, a strapping young village lad we had befriended. I wondered whether there was a telephone in the village now; whether children still asked for medicines from hikers.