Chillin’ in Shimla, The Himalayan Foothills

After two weeks of exploring Rajasthan, we were in need of peace and quiet. We’d been wanting to head to the mountains and McLeod Ganj was in our original plan but we had to settle for something closer and headed to Shimla. We found a great homestay, Marley Villa, and parked ourselves for 10 days.

Shimla may not have been as peaceful as we would have hoped, but it was nice to get away from the chaos and actually be able to go for walks. We took daily walks up the hill to Shimla Mall and back through the bazaar and mainly just relaxed at the Villa. Bruce managed to get a lot of work done and Kasm struck up a friendship with the neighbourhood boys and had a great time running around. Since we didn’t really do much “touristy” stuff, I don’t have a lot to tell you but here are a few pictures to share 🙂

 

Kasm really enjoyed running around with the boys. They played a funny version of “hide and seek”, where the person counting would say “can I come” and others would yell “yes” or “no”. Sometimes it would go on for a long time 😉

 

 

This was part of the path leading to the Shimla Ridge. Home to the “nasty” monkeys. Depending on the time of day, there would be 20-30 of them around and it was terrifying. Even the locals seemed to be scared of them and would move to the other side of the street! We couldn’t take any photos of them. The shiny camera would have been a little too inviting for the little rascals and the last thing we wanted was to fight the crazy monkeys!

 

Little thieves! During one of our walks, one jumped in front of Kasm and nearly gave him a heart attack! Usually, during mid-afternoon, we would have 15-20 monkeys hanging around the villa. I attempted at scaring one of them away but the monkey called my bluff and turned his nose up at me! The Marley villa staff got a chuckle out of that 🙂

 

Shimla Mall is where we walked to every single day. It was quite a steep hike from Marley Villa but we enjoyed it and was much needed to burn all the calories we consumed – we ate a lot in India 😉

After a nice relaxing time in Shima, we boarded the Himalayan Queen (Toy Train) and headed towards Delhi to finish off our Indian Adventure.