Riding day #18, Sept 15, 2019, Purola to Musoorie:  102km, 1,670M up,2,428 M end

Musoorie is another “hill station”, i.e. town on the top of a hill, cooler and less humidity - but on the top of a hill.  Another day (3rd in a row) with serious climbing.  But it was cooler, lower humidity and it did have cold beer!

As I’ve mentioned, there seems to be a “workfare” program where people are hired to manually do road construction - rather than using heavy equipment as we are used to.  This work includes breaking rocks with a sledge hammer - i.e. turning big rocks into small rocks.  I passed several guys today sitting on the side of the road with a pile of big rocks on one side of him (in-basket) and a pile of small broken rocks (out-basket) on the other.  He spent his days pounding on rocks.   Wow, what a hard way to eek out a living.  But then I considered what he must be thinking looking at me slowly grinding up another 2,000M climb - “I just hammer on rocks all day - easy, that poor bastard has to cycle up these huge hills every day - pounding rocks is way easier!”.

pics from the day:

School uniforms

Cactus - high humidity, but little rain

Leaving town