in the summer of 2015, exactly a year before Justin’s arrival at the Parwati Valley, a new graduate of the university from Poland, Bruno Muschalik, went to India to India.
He got an excellent job offer in the Krakow branch of the international consulting and accounting company Ernst & Young, but wanted to take three weeks of vacation before.
From Delhi he went north to Kashmir, and from there to the city of Manali in Himaćal Prades, from where he sent his girlfriend a message that he set off to the Parwati Valley.
It was August 9.
He wrote that he was planning to stop there for a few nights and that maybe he came in the surrounding mountains.
Several days have passed, and Muschalik did not contact the girl or his parents.
They waited until the date of his return flight in case he just lost the phone.
When Muschalik did not appear at the airport in Krakow on August 22, his father flew to India to start searching for his son for many years.
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One of the first recorded disappearances of a foreign traveler in the Parwati Valley took place twenty -five years earlier, in the summer of 1991.
Twenty -four -year -old Odette Houghton, Australian backpacker, was last seen in the temple communion in the mountains.
Her parents began to worry when the packages and the letters they sent her returned, so they contacted the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.
“I got the impression that [diplomats] decided that Odette did not want them to be contacted and advised us not to go to look for her,” said the father of the missing magazine in an Australian magazine.
“> Parents flew to India to search the valley, they put on posters wherever they could, but did not come across any trail. A year later Marianne Heer, a thirty -year -old from Switzerland, was lost, who was last seen in one of the temples in the town of Manicar.
October 1995 Australian Gregory John Powell disappeared from either from the vicinity of Manicran or Malana – it was never officially established. For 1996 one of the loudest matters, the disappearance of Ian Mogford, twenty -year -old British backpacker, who traveled around India with his girl, staying there, staying there on India.
scholarship.
View of the tents in the Parwati Valley
(photo: Shutterstock)
Mogford went alone to the Parwati Valley, from where he called the girl and his parents, and then disappeared.
His father came to India to look for him.
From the conversation with his son, before disappeared, he remembered that he said that he made friends with Sadhu.
Mogford was interested in these Indian saints, but his mother doubted that he was tempted to accept their lifestyle.
The father suspected the worst: “It cannot be ruled out that my son went to the mountains with someone and for some reason he was attacked, and lies at the bottom of the abyss, and his bodies were not found” – he said in an interview with The Telegraph.
However, over the years, Mogfords did not lose the hope that their son was alive.
A year after the disappearance of Mogford to India, twenty -six -year -old Ardavan Taherzadeh, who just finished the first year of law in Vancouver in Canada, went.
From Madras, a city in the south, he reached the mountains.
The last time he called home on May 21, 1997 from a telephone booth in Kasol.
He asked his parents to buy him tickets for the Canadian jazz festival, which was to take place in the summer.
He never gave a sign of life again.
His mother, Homa, Boustani, came to the valley several times, she also went all over India, looking for him.
On one of such expeditions she was accompanied by a small film crew that shot a short Missing in Kullu document [Lost in Kullu].
All the time Boustani appears in a T -shirt with a printed photo of his son and the inscription: Lost in India.
She never came across his trail5.
Years later, one of TaHarzadeh’s close friends posted a post on the internet in which he wondered what could happen: “Has ARD saw something he shouldn’t?
If the motive was money, why did nobody pay funds from his credit card or realized travelers?
Why wasn’t his personal belongings found?
Does ARD get lost somewhere, like one traveler once after trying an extremely hallucinogenic plant that cut him off from reality for eighteen months?
Did he die or are alive? ”
Later, it was attempted to sell, and travel checks were carried out with the signature of someone else. There were rumors that he was murdered and robbed by a seasonal employee who was guilty of the money of the local drug mafia. During the search for Mintzer, the delay was found in the river, but before any analysis was carried out, the body disappeared
Three years later, a Mintzer skeleton was found near the village of Malana. This is one of the few cases when it was confirmed that the remains found belonged to one of the people missing in the Parvati Valley. The bodies of Maarten de Bruijna, a twenty -year -old of the Netherlands, who disappeared in the spring of 1999, never
found. He was last seen in the vicinity of Manican, he was probably walking towards Khirgani. Travel
With a backpack in India, he called home every two weeks, but he didn’t speak from the phone on his father’s birthday.
The father moved in search of in the footsteps of his son, asked the locals and the elders of the villages, but met with indifference.
Road to the village of Malana
(photo: Shutterstock)
In the late nineties, the number of foreign travelers who were lost without a trace in the Parwati Valley began to attract international attention.
A series of mysterious disappearances did not end with the end of the decade.
In the summer of 2000, Aleksiej Ivanov, a thirty -year economist from Russia, disappeared during a mountain journey above Manican.
In 2004, a thirty -year -old backpacker from Italy, Francesco Gatti, was missing, who sent the last mail home on June 26, and the day before he wrote that he wants to go to “a village where no one can be nobody
Touch “, which suggests that he intended to visit Malana. After a few weeks without news, Gatti’s girl founded a blog where she posted information about the search.” They found his things ” – the last post from the beginning of August was.
The police discovered a sachet with Gatti travel documents at one of the side paths near Khirgani, a return ticket to the plane and a journal where the last entry had the date on June 28.
“The sachet is broken, as if someone tried to break her out,” wrote his girlfriend.
A year later, at the beginning of August 2005, Daniel Mountwitten disappeared after just a few days in the valley.
He was twenty -three and double citizenship: Israeli and Australian.
He graduated from military service in Israel, he was on a long international trip.
He traveled with a friend, stopped in one of the guesthouses in a small village near Kasol, on the other side of the river.
One morning he got up early and went for a walk.
When he did not return to the evening, a colleague worried and, after searching on the Parwati River, alerted the police.
The surrounding trails and gorges were combed, Mountwititen was lost like a stone in water.
The hired private detective wrote in the report that he suspects the crime.
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I thought that since so much was done, maybe it is worth trying more ”
on July 20, 2009 Amichaj Steinmec, a citizen of Israel and the United States, set off from Khirganga towards the mountain meadow in Bunbuń
.
He was with a friend, but everyone went a different route.
Steinmetz never arrived in Bunbuni or returned to Khirgana.
For three months there was a search on trails and in the forests around the camp, but no clues related to its disappearance were discovered.
“However, I still believe that my son is alive and got stuck on high mountain passes,” said Steinmetz’s father of the Indian media.
– he is strong enough to survive even in difficulth climatic conditions “.
disappearing in the forest, mountains or in the Valley of people, after which there is almost no trace. And there are more of them than the cases recorded in police registers and reaching the media.
. Contact with loved ones and friends ends suddenly, breaks down after the last letter, phone or email. There are only slim traces that desperate families grab. Some
the mountains blame.
As in every mountain band, there are chasms and cliffs that can cause inexperienced difficulties and even some dry walkers.
It is not these deaths that determine the uniqueness of the Parwati Valley, but the disappearance in the forest, mountains or in the valley of people who have almost no trace of
(photo: Shutterstock)
you can recalculate with forces and skills, release too high, come across a wild animal, get lost or starved.
However, all paths lead to a village that can be reached during the day or two.
Unless the wanderer goes into one of the side gorges departing from the main valley, it is difficult to lose the Parvati River from the eyes.
This is a good landmark, but its edges are treacherous and the current is fast.
Many tourists, foreign and domestic, died when they approached too close and lost their balance.
Some believe that the disappearance is due to the isolation of the valley.
Away from the possibility of obtaining help, tourists become a great target of robbery and murders.
Twenty-, thirty-year-olds, matching the profile of bold travelers looking for physical or spiritual challenges.
So there is a theory that for several decades in the forests on the hills the same serial killer has been prowling and lurks for a specific type of travelers with valuable things, such as cameras, cameras, passports, drugs and cash.
Some speculate that the murderer is Hindu saintly, while others believe that a foreigner who blends into the crowd of tourists and hides in the view.
According to a person from abroad living in the Parwati Valley for several decades, at the turn of the eighties and nineties, a certain Indian was accused of murdering a foreign tourist and arrested here.
There were rumors that he had previously killed thirteen travelers in this area.
(…)
Police, which is understandable, approaches the theory of the serial killer lurking on foreign travelers in the Parwati Valley.
Instead, he strongly claims that some disappearances are undoubtedly associated with drug trafficking here.
When Nishchint Singh Negi served in 2015-2018 as a police commissioner in the area covering the Parwati Valley, the files of several matters of missing international tourists hit his wide wooden desk in the command in Kullu.
In his office with green walls he listened to pleading for help from worried families and concerned friends looking for loved ones.
In his opinion, the hash from the valley is a powerful temptation and bait.
– most tourists come here for hashish: its quality belongs to the highest in the world – claims, rubbing the thumb
For a finger, as if he was rolling a ball between them.
– Malana’s hash is sticky.
regional and national police forces know perfectly well about hidden plantations throughout the Parvati valley, but they do little to limit the flowing uninterrupted
A stream of intoxicating black resin.
Every year, in early autumn, groups of officers organize raids to the villages from time to time to cut the plants with machetes and electric grasshops.
House in the village of Malana
(photo: Shutterstock)
but these are mainly actions for show.
They can destroySeveral thousand hectares of hemp in the valley, but larger plantations, the main part of the crops, are hidden in the mountains, on highly situated meadows, to which you can get in steep trails, with names such as the enchanted valley or the Diabłów Valley.
The police do what he can, but either they are afraid of the strength and influence of organized drug dealers, or does not want to delete one of the most important tourist attractions of the region.
Negi knew that many foreigners deal with both the cultivation and trade in hashish.
Finally, in two or three months you can produce a hash worth many thousands of dollars.
Or, if you buy it wholesale from the source in the valley, you can sell smaller amounts at higher prices in other places in the country – and finance a few months of travel.
families of some missing
Their relatives did not fall victim to drug trafficking, but the drugs themselves.
Haszysz is not the only available substance available in the region that can raise concerns: it is another, much stronger, from a plant with purple-white trumpet flowers, which can be toxic at high doses, and in small hallucinogenic.
Called devilish or devil herb, a stupid turnip or an angel trumpet, it grows all over the world, but its most common name, Datura, indicates that it comes from India [the Polish systematic name is beaten, Latin Datura.
The Polish folk names given above relate to, among others
In Poland, the genre of Dzielań Dziedzierzawa (translated note)].
Here it is a holy plant, a flower, which at one of the shows appears in its curls filed in dreadlocks.
Formerly it was used in Ayurvedic medicine as a medicine for various ailments, such as headaches, inflammation, ulcers or asthma, but the strength of Datura’s action is so difficult to control that its distribution was banned.
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also:
Polish smugglers in India.
“They calculated that after returning they would be able to buy a flat” *Fragments of the book “Lost in the Valley of Death. Obsession and horror in the Himalayas” Harley Rustada, translation: Agnieszka Sobolewska