Tomorrow we leave Dehra Duhn for Yamunotri, the first of the four Char Dham sites and the source of the sacred Yamuna river. After Yamunotri we will be completing the traditional four part yathra (pilgrimage) moving west to east - from Gangotri (source of the Ganga) to Kedarnath (Vishnu) to Badrinath (Siva). We even have plans to walk the old pilgrims path from Gangorti to Kedarnath, a seven day trek. Besides seeing beautiful mountains and meeting lots of pilgrims, the main point of this trip will be to help my girlfriend Andrea with her research on prasad, the ritual of human-divine gift exchange that, along with darsan (human-divine visual exchange), forms the foundation of modern Hindu ritual.

 Despite monumental infrastructure improvements in this area over the past forty years (probably motivated more by a desire to thwart Chinese territorial aspirations than to facilitate Hindu pilgrims), internet will probably still be a rarity, so reports and reflections may have to wait for a return to less elevated and spiritually beneficial locales sometime in June. Til then. . . . .