The Delhi Dehradun express stops for long time at various places and
reaches Dehradun by 9 in the morning. We woke up by the time the train
reached Haridwar and saw dried Ganga on the way.
At Dehradun railway station, you can walk outside to the
Dehradun bus stand where there are half hourly buses to Mussoorie from 6
in the morning to 9 in the night. We walked further, had breakfast, and
walked through the market to reach clock tower. From the clock tower a
small bus took us to Forest Research Institute at ₹10.
There
were a couple of other tourists waiting in the electric cart at the
entrance. We quickly bought entry tickets and sat on it. I was at the
tail, looking back when the cart went forward. The straight road cut at
right angles to several buildings, all in lush green plots.
The
cart dropped us at one end of a large, imperial building built of red
bricks. This was the Forest Research Institute. Some of the corridors
reminded us of Hogwarts.
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There were multiple
“exhibitions” inside the building. The entry ticket would cover all of
them. But the exhibitions were rather the various departments of the
Forest Research Institute. For example, there was this pathology
exhibition, in which the pathophysiology of all the plant diseases were
shown (with pathological specimens just like our medical college).
Siviculture exhibition was about cultivating forests and there were tiny
models of forests showing how the trees looked at different height. In
another room, there were cross sections of 800 year old trees showing
tree rings that corresponded to different years in the history. One of
these rooms, I heard about cordyceps sinensis which is a fungus
that parasitically grows out of worms apparently more expensive than
gold and extremely difficult to procure.
A nearby
school had come for picnic there and when we got outside the Institute’s
garden was full of kids playing different games in their own little
groups. This is also where our Russian friend saw someone posing in one
of the classic Bollywood hero poses and imitated those himself. We
started walking back and got on to the electric cart about a minute down
the path. Then we took a vehicle back to the Dehradun city back to
where we started from.
At the bus stand, there were
regular and frequent buses to Mussoorie. All we had to do was stand in
queue and reserve seats in the next bus that was going up. The ride is
just under a couple of hours but the road is winding and uphill.