The good thing about tours is that you forget all your daily
worries, timeline crunches and just live
free… and when you are with friends…the blessing from above…you find the time
flying past.…. And that’s the very thing I enjoyed on my first voyage to kiss
the Himalayan valleys…. The kulu-Manali treat…
Normally I find it very difficult to open my eyes at
8.30 in the morning even after 3 rounds of alarms on a working day. But strangely,
on the day of my start of the journey I woke up at 4.30 all alone without any
alarm and reached railway station at 5.45. So much for the early waking.. my
train was at 6.40…. So an hour at the Chennai Central watching the silk saree
adds… that really was a bad start… anyhow managed to find a seat and slowly
slipped to a nap. The next thing I hear is the announcement that the Duranto
express to Hazrath Nizamudhin will leave from platform 11 in a few mts…Oh gosh…I
dnt even know where the platform was. Somehow I managed to aboard the train and
it left the station as if it was waiting for me.
Sitting inside the ac
cabin it felt like the train is floating above the rails… and it floated past
dry barren wheat lands and reached Nizamudhin at 11.30 the next day.
You know
its always nice to be with your family and ur loved ones… and that’s exactly
what was awaiting me there… Ammini
oppol,ettan, kids and sailaja vallyamma….they ve always been there when I count
my family and so it was nice to c them
and that too at their place..Got a whole day for the never ending chit chat…
and left there by 3 the next evening. Back to nizamudhin
station and finally my comrades Hari and Rajesh or in other words “badasab” arrived
after a horrible train journey running 5 hrs late… then soon we found ourselves
in janasadabdi to chandigarh and that I should tell u is a very good train.
Like I said , with friends time fly… we reached chandigarh before we knew and
there ,one more friend joined.. Vinay. We went to his place at kalka.
Everything was planned by us until we encountered our taxi
driver the next day. Mr “Pulunthan”( that’s what we named him). Its really a
wonder how he fits into an indigo and he can hardly turn the steering coz it
will hit his belly.. Needless to say we keralites in front of Punjabis will
look like a sheep standing next to a bison.. We started our rest of the journey in the
Indigo with Pulunthan… The roads were covered on top with some beautiful trees with
violet and yellow leaves.. Thus began the dream journey…
We left the planning to pulunthan as he wld be more familiar
with the place. So he said its better to fix base at Manali and see places
there and then head to maclaudganj, jammu and back to kalka via chandigarh. So as planned we went straight to Manali . On
the way we saw a valley and it looked like lights sprinkled or like water drops
on a mirror illuminated by a yellow light. Then pulunthan said that we were crossing
Kulu. We skipped the place as it had nothing more to offer than the manali.
Reached manali by night and arranged a room and dosed off.
The one good thing about travelling with badasab is that adequate sleep and
food is always guaranteed.. So the next day there was no question of getting up
early.
The next day we left the hotel at our ease. At first to a nearby temple
and there, for the first time in my life I saw a Yak… In our school days we
were taught Y for Yak but had never seen that. So it was nice. Then we headed
to Solang Valley. Though we had the opportunity for some adventure sports like skiing,
paragliding and all we preferred not to cut our own neck with a blade. The main
attraction at the place is a Shiva temple right at the foot of a small
waterfall in a snow clad valley. The car could take us only 2 kms short of the
place. So for the rest we had 2 options, either by foot or by horse and trust
me the smell of the horses stink….So we preferred to walk the distance.
Well… for someone spending
17 hrs on chair or sort of and the rest
on bed, walking the 2 kms was never an easy task. Moreover we ran out of oxygen
because of the altitude. But nothing mattered much as the place was so serene
and it felt like heaven (Seriously I don’t ve any previous experience of
visiting the heaven… bt in my imagination). Finally made the 2kms walk and the
scene of the ice and a tiny fall of water which gets sprinkled in the air and
never made the ground made me stand like paused .
The unexpected walk made us all hungry and then came Maggie to the
rescue. In that cold weather, the hot Maggie felt like the best food ever had
in our lives. Once we wiped the plates off we went for our first encounter with
the ice. We enjoyed the place and headed back after the Shiva darshan. After
lunch we had a quick nap and then in the evening we went to a park near by
filled with Christmas trees and we ended up in a river or rather a stream.
After that we headed to the local market. As we walked past making some window
shopping we noticed some gorgeous street dogs which were really photogenic and
lot more other gorgeous photogenic beings of which I am not supposed to mention here
In the market we saw a budhist temple and some festival was going on there. Walking past that, we slowly made our way to the room as we had to leave early the next day. Next day to Rohtang pass…. Puluntan’s car wouldn’t go there and so he arranged a sumo for us instead. On our way we rented some ice suits and boots. We paid around 3k for that and we got a guide as a complimentary gift.
There we had one more option other than walking and horse ride.. the quad bikes. But we let the miser in us take the guise of adventurists and preferred walking again, and this time for 4kms. The steep ice mountains never mattered to the guide and he easily covered the distance while we were still climbing. At the top as we looked down the roads appeared to us like rivers and the snow clad mountains filled our frames.
Again after the Maggie rescue we started our skiing lessons on skiing board or sticks whatever u may call them. We never made that task but we indeed did some butt skiing and that was really good….;-)… after an hour of excitement we planned our way back . On the way down I saw a quad biker and wanted to take a photo of mine on that.. So first took a couple of photos of him to impress and then asked him to take mine.
The ride back was awesome, with an off road drive down the hill to avoid a traffic block , the hanging bridge and the narrow road between the flowered apple trees all made that worth.
The next day we headed to an another shiva temple and then
to maclaudgangh. This temple had a specialty that even though it was amidst the
snow clad mountains, there was a 24/7 supply of natural hot water. The phosphorous
content of the water is supposed to be the reason for that.
The road to maclaudgangh
was again awesome. The ghat roads with turns every now and then and risking our
way through hairpins which if missed will land us in a river way down… The
other side of the valley had wheat fields which looked like waves in the river
and some beautiful house at some un imaginably precarious places. We came down
the hill and went side by side with the river and then we stopped by for the
most wonderful thing that happened to us in the tour, Rafting…. It certainly
was a delightful experience to pierce through the dead cold water
with one hand
held tight on the ropes and the other holding our friend’s. Though we got all
drenched up in ice cold water we enjoyed every bit of the ride.That day we
halted in a hotel on our way and the next day we paid a quick visit to the Dalelama’s
place at maclaudgangh and went straight to Jammu. Actually we had no time to c
Jammu as such, bt it was part of a technical planning by badasab. So made our quick visit to a temple
there and had our halt for the day at Pathankot, Punjab. The fact that we had to
return to our daily lives haunted us like anything. The return tickets of both
Rajesh and Hari were not confirmed till that night. The next morning, Rajsh bai’s
ticket got confirmed bt Hari had to take Tatkal. Should we call it fate, I don’t
know but Hari got 1 out of the 5 available tickets by tatkal. After that we headed back to kalka
through chandigarh and on the way just
paid a visit to the rock garden and rose garden at chandigarh.
The dream run was about to end in a day. Again back to the
work life, parting ways with our friends, the very thought of it broke us all.
But it was obvious that it has to happen… One fact was again proved that
friends are the greatest blessings we receive in our lives and I am glad that I
have a bunch of them. Each moment spent with them were made into memories which
no time can erase… and I thank them all…just for being there…. 
