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Rati Gali Lake |
Kashmir is the Heaven on earth and there is no
doubt about it. Many place are still requires to be explored. For example take
Ratti Gali Lake, maybe we are listening this name first time but it is one of
the famous lakes in Kashmir. It is located in Neelum Vally and you need to
travel through Muzafarabad and then Dowarian or Domail. Dowarian at a distance
of 13 Km from Neelum at an altitude of 1615 meters is surrounded by mountains
full of conifer trees. Over here a mule track up to Rattigali pass (about 30
Km) towards west, connects the Neelum and Kaghan Valley.
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| Rati Lake |
Bus Travel
Islamabad
to Muzaffarabad: There are multiple options available for travelling to
muzaffarabad. One is to travel from Skyways. They run coaster service that is
available every 30-60 minutes. The charges are nominal for each passenger. One
can also go to muzaffarabad using Hiace from Faizabad or Pirwadhai. The travel
time between Islamabad-Muzaffarabad is about 4hrs. For Muzaffarabad to Dwarian,
there are not many options available for going to Dwarian. The only option is
to travel through the bus. The bus can take you up to the Kel. The distance
between Muzaffarabad to Dwarian is about 100KMs. With the road conditions due
to monsoon it took us about 9.5hrs to reach Dwarian.
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| Ratti Lake |
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| Ratti Lake |
The Trek
We
reached Dwarian around 7:00 AM in the morning. If one has to stay at Dwarian
there are two rest houses of AJK government and a few hotels at Dwarian.
Porters/guides were readily available at the bus stop. We did our breakfast at
a hotel in Dwarian and started out trekking at 8 AM. This is a very beautiful
trek with lush green forests and runs along a nullah of fresh water. We reached
at domail (domail means a meeting point of two rivers or nullah, do-mail
literally means two-meeting) around 6 PM and camped there. Availability of
drinking water is good as there are a lot of natural fountains in the trek. The
trek is a gradual ascend from 1550 meters to 3150 meters (height of our camping
site). Next day we started our trek with
daypacks towards the lake. It was an ascend of about 500 meters to the lake and
trek of about 1.30 hrs. There are two lakes, one is small and exists due to the
falling water of main lake and the other is a bit higher and is at altitude of
3650meters. A part of the main lake was snow covered.
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| Rati Gali Lake |
From
the lake one can trek to noori-naar top and descend to shardah via jeep, or
trek to naran via ratti gali pass. There is another option of going to Kala-Sar
(kala jheel, the name is due to the dark blue water of the lake) that is about
4-5hours trekking from the lake. To cover one of these options one has to have
a knowledgeable guide/porter that knows the trek and has done it recently.
We
descended back to our camping site, packed our camps and started descending
back to Dwarian at 3PM. We reached at dwarian around 8.30PM and traveled back
to Keran for camping. Keran is beautiful place to camp near the river bank. The
river here is also LOC (line of control).
Note: at the start of the trek our
information was like the first lake is Dwarian lake (that we visited) and the
Ratti or Rattigali lake is about 4-5hours from dwarian lake. But from the
porters and locals we got to know that the lake we visited has two names:
Dwarian lake and Ratti or Rattigali lake.
The second lake is known as kala-sar that is about 4-5 hours from dwarian/ratti lake.
The second lake is known as kala-sar that is about 4-5 hours from dwarian/ratti lake.
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