Kullu Valley, Kullu

                   The fertile Kullu valley rises northward from Mandi at 760 metres to the the Rohtang pass at 3978 metres, the gateway to Lahaul and Spit. In the south the valley is little more than a narrow, precipitous gorge, with the Beas River sometimes a sheer 300 metres below the narrow road.
         Further up, the valley widens and its main part is 80 km long, though rarely more than a couple of km wide. Here there are stonefruit and apple orchards, rice fields and wheat fields along the Valley floor and lower slopes, and deodar forests higher up the slopes, with snow-crowned rocky peaks towering behind. The main towns, Kullu and Manali. Are in this fertile section of the valley.

The people of the Kullu Valley are friendly, devout, hard-working and relatively prosperous. The men wear the distinctive Kullu cap, a pillbox with a flap around the front in which they may stick flowers. The women wear lots of silver jewellery and long garments homespun wool secured with great silver pins; they are rarely without a large conical basket on their backs, filled with fodder, firewood or even a goat kid.

The other people of the valley are the nomads who take their flocks of black sheep and white goats up to the mountain pastures in the early summer and retreat before the winter snows. You don't really know what wool smells like until you've travelled in a bus overcrowded with rain-soaked villagers.

The valley also has many Tibetan refugees, some running restaurants and hotels in Manali, but many others in camps near the rivers. The Tibetans are great traders- you'll find them in all the bazaars- but many also work in road gangs, whole families toiling together.

The Kullu Valley was always a popular place, but it managed to retain a very peaceful and unhurried atmosphere. With the troubles in Kashmir, however, the valley in general and Manali in particular, have largely replaced Kashmir as the place to go to see the snow. The result is that it is going ahead at an enormous rate- the Manali area now has over 400 hotels, compared with less than 50 eight years ago, and more are appearing each month. Unfortunately the expansion seems to be largely unplanned, and so the landscape is changing rapidly, often for the worse as more and more insensitively designed buildings get thrown up. One can only wonder just what will happen to all the hotels when and if the problems in Kashmir are resoled. 

                   Kullu is the district headquarters of the valley but it is not the main tourist centre; that honour goes to Manali. Nevertheless there are a number of interesting Kullu, and some fine walks. The town,  which sprawls on the western bank of the Beas, is dominated by the grassy maidans things to see around

                       They're the site for Kullu's fairs and festivals, in particular the colourful Dussehra Festival, from which the Kullu's Valley gained the name valley of the Gods.