Some things never
seem to get over! Well, I did mention in my last post that it indeed was the last
of my Himalayas story. Well, it really was. This one, is the way UK saw
it!
Guest Post by
UK.
--
Finally, Ashwin
has managed to do what the two of us set out to achieve almost a year back;
blog about the Himalayan trip! I mean yeah, it was quite an achievement to
actually do the trip, but the way in which he’s jotted down every tiny detail
of the trip just so that he can blog about it, is immensely commendable! I
wanted to do it too, but got too lazy too soon, and haven’t managed to write a
word about it. But seeing that Ashwin has completed the story, I thought I’d
chip in with a guest post.
Introductions
are in store. I’m the UK that Ashwin kept referring to, the protagonist of this
one-off blog (I’m writing it, so I might as well be the hero here!), the only
one on the trip riding a Royal Enfield bike (I’ll get into bike comparison and
bashing a little later), and the one who easily spent the most amount of money
on this trip!
And let me
introduce you to the other two riders too, so you know what my perspective is.
I’ll start with Shoib. If I dig into my memory, I vaguely remember that it was
he who planned the entire trip. So my first impression of him was that of a
seasoned traveller, who somehow always knows which the nicest places to go are.
You know how when you have this mental image of a person built up, and when you
meet that person, he/she isn’t anything like what you had imagined? It happened
again. I thought he’d be another tall swanky lad, but he was at least a foot
shorter than both Ashwin & me. He landed up at the airport about 20 minutes
later than what he had scheduled. I didn’t see it as much of a sign, but little
did I know back then that it was going to be that way for the rest of the trip!
He was constantly the last one to get ready, and had the strangest habit of
waking up in the morning and then packing his stuff. Ashwin & I always used
to pack the previous night, no matter how tired we were, so that we could just
get up in the morning and strut off. On the first couple of times he told us
that he’d do it the next morning, we thought he’d wake up 15-20 minutes before
we planned to, and pack his bags, so we’d all be ready to leave at the same
time. We quickly realized that wasn’t the case. He’d happily wake up at the
same time as us, and take an additional half hour, and that is on a good day,
to pack his stuff. It didn’t bother me much, but sometimes it got to Ashwin’s
nerves, and there are two main reasons for that.
1. It’s quite
easy to get on Ashwin’s nerves. If you’ve been reading his blogs, you’d notice
how pissed he gets at some (all) of his friends!
2. He always
woke up an hour before the both of us, in the anticipation that the earlier we
leave the better for us. Needless to say, he’d spend about 2.5 hours every
morning just waiting for the two of us to be ready to leave, of which I was
responsible only for the first hour!
Although, I have
to hand it to Shoib that he was clearly the more adventurous one. He was game
for riding in the night, wouldn’t hesitate in opening up his throttle &
thereby matching my speed, and instantaneously agreed to do some random crazy
things that just sprang to my head. Climbing down to a stream while waiting for
the bulldozers to clear out a landslide, climbing back up in one tenth the time
we took to climb down, realizing that the road had been open and our bikes were
blocking the rest of the traffic, willingness to ride to Sarchu from Pang in
the darkness of the night when almost everyone said it was dangerous and too
stupid to attempt, removing the tube out of my rear tyre with two tiny little
screw drivers when Ashwin went out to get help are the few things that come to
mind. Come to think of it, I don’t think he can be blamed for making us wait.
He’s sort of a laidback guy who likes to take things easy. Ashwin wanted
clockwork precision in everything. And I, well I was sort of treading the middle
path. Being lazy when I wanted to, and demanding precision when I wanted to. :)
Ashwin: Now you
all know him right? Quite well, that too, I’d presume. There can’t be any other
plausible explanation as to why you’d be reading his blog if you didn’t know
him. Good, with that established, I’m sure you’d agree when I say that given
how much he makes fun of others’ stupidity, he has his own blonde moments of
which he’s not too proud. Here are a few from the trip.
Excerpts from
our conversation after heading back from Vijay Path to Dras, as the army guys
suggested that riding down to Kargil in the night amidst the trucks was just
downright stupid:
Ashwin (slightly
angry): I can’t believe both you guys sped off the way you did. I told you that
I’d be tailing you and can’t see clearly in the night.
Me: Sorry about
that, but why can’t you see clearly in the night?
Ashwin: I have short-sightedness.
I need my spectacles to be able to see distant objects, and it’s worse in the
night.
Me: So… Why
didn’t you wear your spectacles now?
Ashwin: Oh, I
left them in Bangalore. I’m not carrying them with me!
I don’t remember
where we were, but I’m guessing we headed out of Leh and towards Manali. Shoib
and I decided to stop as it had been some time since we had last seen Ashwin.
He finally showed up at a distance. Shoib and I started our bikes, and
continued riding just as he was about to catch up with us. Half an hour later,
we lost Ashwin again. I signalled Shoib to stop, and this time around we waited
for nearly 30 minutes before Ashwin showed up. Shoib was taking pictures and so
we waited for Ashwin to stop and get a breather too. He got off his bike and
this conversation ensued.
Ashwin: I was so
pissed at both you guys.
Me: Why what
happened?
Ashwin: I fell
off my bike, and I was shouting out, and neither of you heard me.
Me: Wow! We
didn’t know. I mean neither of us heard you, else we’d have stopped. And is
that why you were so behind us?
Ashwin: I mean
not now, this was before the last time I saw you guys. I was actually angry and
wanted to yell at you, but you just saw me, sat on your bikes and rode away!
Me: And we lost
you again after that?!
Ashwin: Yeah!
You guys were hardly 100 meters in front of me, how could you not hear?!
I had quite a
few things going on in my mind, but I didn’t say it. I had to maintain my Zen
like calm, you see. “I mean come on! It’s quite simple that we didn’t hear it.
Maybe your vocal chords decided to go all sissy at that very moment you shouted
out for us. Maybe, if you weren’t so freaking watchful and slow, you’d have
been closer to us and given us a better chance to hear you and perhaps even not
fallen in the first place. The point is that, we didn’t hear you! If we did, we
would’ve stopped! We’re your friends after all, and not the kinds that want to
see you dead, so I don’t see why you got pissed.” But I didn’t say it. And
Ashwin himself had lost his willingness to yell at that time, so we rode on.
I had never
heard, nor do I think I’ll ever get to hear Ashwin speak in Hindi. But I had a
good dose of it during this trip. I was awestruck when he belted out lines
like, “Yahaan ka mausam bahut hi ajeeb hai. Dhoop mein bahut garmi lagti hai
aur chaaun mein tand lag thi hai!” “Isse achchi chai main zindagi mein pehle
kabhi nahi peeya hoon!”
Well, that about
enough about the two of them. We were all together for most part of the trip,
so I wouldn’t have anything to add to what Ashwin has already written. Except
for the couple of times I wasn’t with them. The first was after leaving
Sonmargh to head towards Kargil. The second was when I had to bid them adieu in
Manali to get back to Bangalore.
We left Sonmargh
after a rather shabby lunch, and head towards Kargil. I was leading the pack,
and almost immediately, saw this huge, beautiful mountain, with the snow making
amazing patterns on it. Seeing that we had just taken a big break, I continued
riding, in the hope that Shoib & Ashwin would interpret that as, “Let’s not
stop to take pictures. Let’s keep going!” After a little while, I hit an intersection
in the road. I could continue riding down further in the mountains, or I could
take a narrow bridge that leads to god-knows-where. I asked a shepherd the way
to Kargil, and he asked me to continue on the mountain path. There was no other
soul in sight. I thought if Ashwin & Shoib do show up, chances are the
shepherd might’ve wandered off somewhere else, and they’d take the narrow
bridge. So I decided to wait for them. And I waited for about half an hour. No
signs of them. I decided to ride back than stay there any longer. About 50
metres on my way back, the roads were blocked all of a sudden. I parked my
bike, and walked up to the guy setting up the barricades to ask him what was
going on. He told me that they were blasting a few rocks, and hence the path would
be closed for an hour. And I thought to myself, “God dammit guys! Was it really
important for you to stop and click pictures of that mountain?!” I checked my
phone, it had no signal. I asked the guy if he could radio his peers on the
other side of the blocked path, and check for two guys on black motorcycles. He
did, and told me that he had last seen four bikes cross about 4 hours back, and
then a single bike about an hour back. I figured the single bike was mine. The
4 bikes were probably of the Highway Huns. So, where were Ashwin & Shoib?
With nothing else to do, I continued to ride.
Break-from-writing-to-give-you-a-tip-from-a-first-time-Himalayan-rider: Always read about the places you’re
going to go through, especially the ones with names that end in “La”.
As I continued
riding, wondering if either or both of them had fallen off the cliff, I went
through what can only be described as the footprints left from a Godzilla
stampede. Every single time I went over a nasty patch of road, I was more
assured that I wasn’t headed towards Kargil, but towards some unknown valley of
death. Halfway through, I stopped when I saw a bunch of tourists in a Chevrolet
van, and rechecked if I was on the right path. They told me I was, and I asked
them if this was the only way to Kargil from Sonmargh. They told me that was
the only way. And I asked them why the roads were so terrible, and they
replied, “Haven’t you heard of Zozila?” I answered in the negative. And he went
on to tell me that I was perhaps the only soul who decided to ride to Leh
without knowing about Zozila. It translates to the “Pass of Blizzards”. The
roads are the way they are because the guys at the Border Road Organization use
bulldozers to clear the snow from the blizzards every winter.
I rode on ahead,
until I finally hit the town of Dras, and ran into the Highway Huns there. They
kept me company until Ashwin & Shoib showed up. All of them were hoping for
a heated showdown between us, because until then I thought those two guys
stopped to click pictures. Little did I know that Ashwin’s bike had broken
down!
The other
occasion I was left alone, was when I had to head back to Chandigarh from
Manali. I had booked my flight from Delhi to Bangalore on Thursday night (don’t
remember the exact dates now), and we had reached Manali on Wednesday night.
Due to a dysfunctional back brake & a completely conked out front brake, I
couldn’t ride faster than 25kmph for the last 40 kms, heading down slope into
Manali. That meant we reached only by about 10pm. I went to the bus station
immediately to find out when the last bus to Delhi was. They told us that 9pm
was the last bus out of Manali to anywhere, so there’s no way in hell we were
going to find a bus until the next morning. We tried talking to a few cab guys
there, and they all charged in excess of 9000 to drop me to Delhi. Dismissing
them as ridiculous, I decided to make an alternate plan. Cancel my flight
tickets from Delhi to Bangalore, book tickets from Chandigarh to Bangalore, and
take the first bus out of Manali to Chandigarh the next morning. This idea, in
theory at least, should have worked. Chandigarh was 300 kms away from Manali
whereas Delhi was about 600. If I leave early enough, I should get to
Chandigarh by mid day, giving me a couple of hours there before I boarded my
flight.
The only thing
was, the bus next morning didn’t take 6 hours to get to Chandigarh (I always
assume that buses do an average of about 50kmph. If you’ve travelled in the
KSRTC Volvo buses, they average around 70kmph), it took 12 hours. My flight was
at 5:45 and I reached Chandigarh at 6pm. I went to the airport anyway, to see
if I could take any alternate flights. I was told that there was a flight to
Delhi at 7pm, which would reach at 8pm, and then I could take the 8:45pm flight
out of Delhi to Bangalore. (Yup! It was the exact same flight from the ticket
that I had cancelled). I thought there was nothing else I could do but opt for
it. Just as I told the lady at the counter to book the tickets, she told me
that the 7pm flight from Chandigarh to Bangalore was full. I had to get to
Bangalore the next day. I had one day to collect my forex, visa & passport
from office before I headed out to an official UK visit. There was no way I
could miss that.
I asked them for
flights out from Chandigarh to Bangalore the next morning, and they told me
that the first one was at 9am; it had a stopover in Delhi, so would take about
6 hours in all to reach Bangalore. Crap, that wouldn’t work for me. I asked
them for flights out from Delhi to Bangalore the next morning. The first one
was at 6am, reaching Bangalore at 8:30am. That sounded more reasonable. But the
only thing was getting to Delhi. I checked with the cops present there, and
they told me there are ample buses plying to Delhi, and it takes about 6 hours
to get there. So I booked my tickets from Delhi to Bangalore, and headed out to
the bus stop in Chandigarh, managed to get a seat in the last luxury bus headed
towards Delhi, before I could finally get back home.
What an ordeal
it was, but I managed to get through it successfully. Or so I thought. I got back
from my UK trip two weeks later and Ashwin rode down to my house on his bike. I
asked him where my bike was, and he gave me the weigh bill for it. When I
called the courier guys, they told me it hadn’t reached yet. It took a few more
days for them to get it, and I had to go to their JC Road office to pick it up.
And suddenly it flashed to me. The last time I rode my bike, I barely managed
to scrape through to Manali with two nearly completely dysfunctional brakes.
How I was going to ride it back home was beyond me.
When I got to
the Gati office, I looked at the mess my bike had become. I hadn’t seen it in
daylight ever since we rode through Rohtang La and it was literally brown in colour.
Covered in all the slush, which had now dried up to form a thick mud wall,
there was no way I could ride my bike. I thought I must give it a try
nevertheless. But my bike didn’t think so. It refused to start. And I had to
lug it in a mini-tempo back home. The trip had taken a toll on the bike. The E
in Royal EnfiEld logo had fallen off, the tank had a million tiny dents and a
couple of large ones, the front disk assembly was completely conked, the
electrical needed to be rewired, and the fuse assembly replaced. It cost me a
fortune & 4 more days of not having my bike to get it all done.
Been-there-done-that-tip:
It’s far cheaper to get to Leh and hire bikes from there, than shipping your
own bike, “especially” if the brand of your bike is Royal Enfield.
