The meadow doesn't end.
You've been walking for two hours from Raithal and the treeline is behind you and the grass is in every direction and the mountains — Bandarpoonch, the Gangotri range — are enormous on the horizon. The organised trek group you passed an hour ago is somewhere behind you. You walked past where their route turned right and kept going across the meadow and now there is nobody visible in any direction.
A shepherd's dog appears from nowhere and sits beside you for five minutes, entirely unbothered by your presence, watching the same mountains. Then it leaves.
The meadow continues unfolding. At 28 square kilometres, the crowd doesn't ruin it. The scale simply absorbs it. You could walk for another hour and not reach the far edge, and the mountains would still be there, and the grass would still be that particular shade of Himalayan green.
You understand that the honest version of this place — popular but vast, commercial in parts but fundamentally a meadow at 3,700 metres with uninterrupted views — is better than whatever overclaimed version you had read before coming.
