Fagu: Where time stands still

A little ahead of Shimla, the town of Fagu is an idyllic escape from the crowd

People go to places for different reasons. Some go with a sense of adventure, others return to the comfort of the familiar. Some want to taste new cultures, others want to push their limits. The reason I went to Fagu, a pretty mountain hamlet in Himachal Pradesh, was that it didn’t have any horses. I don’t abhor members of the species equine, neither am I in the habit of travelling for such specious reasons. However, we escaped to the safe horseless haven of Fagu after spending a couple of hours in Kufri, wherein every step we took was into mounds of dung, old and fresh, made by legions of underfed horses.

“It’s nicer when the snow covers it all,” said a horsewala when he failed to interest the children in joyrides on mangy steeds. “Kufri is a skiers’ paradise in winter.” We were unimpressed. “If it is a skiers’ paradise, why are there so many people here in September when there’s no snow?” asked my daughter. “They like the horses, I guess,” said he. We didn’t. Neither did we like the yaks that were understandably ill-tempered as they must have been cooking in the sun under their furry hides. It was at that point that our driver suggested we went to Fagu, merely 6 km away. “It has just a couple of hotels, of which only one is decent,” said the driver. “And there are neither crowds nor horses there.”

It sounded perfect. So we drove down the pine-scented road to Fagu and liked it so much that we booked rooms at The Apple Blossom, the aptly named Himachal Pradesh Tourism Development Corporation hotel. Fagu is a pretty little town with apple orchards and thick groves of cedar and spruce. Being almost 1,000 feet higher than Shimla, it is much cooler than the crowded capital. It is on a mountain ridge, offering beautiful vistas of snow-capped peaks on one side and rolling hills covered with orchards and terraced fields of potato on the other. The views were hard to resist, so as soon as we deposited our bags in the hotel’s unexpectedly roomy rooms, we immediately set off to explore our environs.

“Look, apples!” shouted my son who eats about five a day. Ahead was an orchard with trees laden with fruit. We walked past it at a leisurely pace, hoping to espy its owner. Instead, we spotted an apple-seller ahead and stopped to buy some. He had just one basket of fruit and said that if we bought all its contents, he’d be able to get a longer siesta that afternoon. “I used to go to Shimla when I was younger. Then I realised that the profits I made from selling one basket could easily sustain me. So I thought, why bother selling more apples when I can sleep instead?” he said. He told us that traders like him have been around for centuries. “In fact the Hindustan-Tibet Road passes through Fagu,” he said. “We’ve seen all sorts of merchants and traders pass this way.”

The Apple Blossom, is the aptly named Himachal Pradesh Tourism Development Corporation hotel

Sure enough, as we ambled along we came across two men with a herd of sheep and goats.

They’d walked all the way from Rajasthan with their animals. “They are in great demand in the mountains. Every house here has a couple of sheep and goats,” they told us. It had taken them almost three months to walk this far and they were hoping to sell all their animals in the next fortnight. “Then we’ll take the bus back home to Rajasthan,” they said.

Autumn in Fagu, we realised, is quite beautiful. The heat of the sun is offset by bracing winds and chilly evenings. The Apple Blossom has a large terrace, perfect for those endless cups of masala tea. With tea, we snacked on mushroom on toast to salute the beginning of the mushroom season here. With every bite, I wondered what it was about freshly plucked vegetables that made them taste so wonderful. So, of course, we followed the snack with mushroom and peas curry for dinner, and the next morning, with delicious mushroom masala omelets for breakfast. By breakfast we’d built up quite some appetites. We had decided to climb a thousand steps to a nearby hilltop to see an old temple and view the hills around. On our way down, we eschewed the steps for a longer, but lazier, walk through some pine groves. Inhaling their fresh scent and looking at the children’s flushed cheeks, I reckoned that little seemed to have changed in Fagu since the 1910 gazetteer of Shimla declared it to have the healthiest climate in Shimla state.

Although within the first few hours of arriving in Fagu, it was as if time had slowed down and settled into a less frenetic pace, the time to leave arrived altogether too soon. Fagu receded in our memories almost the instant we returned to our chaotic lives. Then I found a stray pinecone the children had carried back. It lies on my desk now, a reassuring reminder in our fast moving lives of a place where time has almost stood still.