A trip to Chitkul

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22nd January 2010:

I was running against the time to finish my final monthly presentation. Our trip was totaly dependent on the fact that I complete the presentation with no more to-dos. Saurabh, Shubh, Harish, Rakesh and Pranav had their fingers crossed and I was hoping to end my monthly work by 10:00 PM.

"Thank you all for joining in, and have a great weekend", I had managed to close the call and I walked down to rest of the group.
"Presentation done, lets go" I exclaimed in excitement.

It was a big relief since after every presentation we used to get bombarded with questions and modification requests that usually would take a day to be completed, but it was a pleasent exception this time.

Prologue

We have been planning to go out on an excursion to mountains for over a week now. All 6 of us were all game to go on higher grounds even though it was quite cold in Delhi with temperature dipping as low as 4 degrees celcius. Our travel veterans Saurabh and Harish had already been to lot of places and came out with lot of suggestions while rest of us looked in maps to locate them. World really looks so small in a Map with just tiny lines defining vast boundries.

I hadn't seen snow for over 18 years, even though I was born in Kashmir. Kashmir valley, being roughly 1800 meters above sea level is a paradise with snow falls in winters and lush green vegetations across mountains during summer-spring time. I badly wanted to go to some place higher where I could do something remotely known as "adventure".

After lot of deliberations, we encircled a remote location "Chitkul" on map. Chitkul is arguably the last village before China in Himachal Pradesh. At an altitude of over 3500 meters, its surrounded by mountains over 5500 meters high espacially "Kinnaur Kailash" tallest of them all. I had never heard of this place but Rakesh had been there during spring season and it looked beautiful as per him. We checked on lot of sites and blogs to find the near accurate description of the place during winters so that we can be sure that it was possible to go there during this season. We did find a blog which had amazing pictures and detailed travel description of whole trip. Deep down in our heart everyone of us knew that we were going to "Chitkul". Without wasting time though we had plenty, we did some maths on excel to estimate the total budget and some daily chores planning.

I had nothing much on plate for next 5 days, rest of us had backups to help with any ad-hoc requests. We were all set for our adventure trip.
We had estimated expense of approx 4000 per person, we hired an Innova from west Delhi with extra stress on a professional driver and managed to
take a leave from work on 25th Jan so that we get 4 days at our disposal (23 - 26).

23rd January 2010 at 00:30 am

We stepped outside our office to stare right in dense fog with bone chilling air. My heart sank, "damn, why the hell had it to be so dense today". visibility was restricted to barely a meter and I had no clue weather even walking in this fog would be safe forget about driving on notorious NCR highways.

Our driver had already called couple of times since he was unable to locate the office in this fog. Saurabh had gone home to pack his stuff so had Shubh. It was me , Harish, Pranav and Rakesh in almost vacant office playing all sort of pc games. It was getting boring. By this time i already had received many calls from my dad instructing me to abandon my plans since there were already many accidents reported and there was a case of car accident near Bilaspur which had claimed 7 lives, all as young as we were. Though with little apprehension I managed to convince him but still I had my share of doubts.

We finally boarded the cab at 01:00 am. Yash ji, our driver even managed to say "kya sir, subh nikal jaate, abhi itna kohra hai". I just gave him a wry smile.
We had to pick up Shubh from Gurgaon and then Saurabh from West Delhi enroute to Karnal highway.

Harry (Harish), sat in front with driver to navigate him through wide lanes of Gurgaon though anything coule be barely seen due to fog. We picked up Shubh at 01:30 along with a bag full of lot of Rum bottles. All of us were excited for Rum ... errr I mean "trip to Chitkul".

Drive to Saurabh's house was eventful, with cab running at 20 kph and both driver and navgator trying to make out where the road was leading us. A Drive that would take us not more than 25 minutes at that time took us 60 minutes. We picked up Saurabh at 02:30 am and all of us were ready for the trip to begin. We re-shuffeled the seating arrangements, I sat in front with the driver while Saurabh, Pranav and Rakesh sat in middle seat. Shubh and Harish had taken over last seats with agenda clear on their minds. I was looking hard in front to locate the road and giving instructions to move either ways based on my limited sight. Driver had no choice but to drive along the divider with a queue of cars trailing us. GT Karnal highway was full of trucks and vehicles with Punjab registrations. Couple of cars drove as if they had night visions on and disappeared in the fog while other were more cautious and increased their speeds only the stretches where road was little more visible.

My eyes were strained, Yash ji was cursing the drivers ahead as we slowly crossed Sonepat-Panipat. I was keeping track of all the expenses on stickies that pranav gave me just before we started of our drive. I had a tough yet an important job (pun intended). On our way we saw several vehicles knocked off on the roads and parked with parking lights on. They had either banged into another vehicle or managed to hit the divider on the roads. few of them had crashed into barricades meant for diversion.

Chandani bar was at its full swing inside the car. Harish had started his marathon stint with Shubh at close heels while rest of us did formalities barring me.
I had an important task at hand. Harbhajan Mann was singing at its best though not much could be understood.

We stopped at "Jhilmil", must have been close to 5:00 am. It was loo cum chai break. We had our "espacial tea" and warmed our hands over the smouldering coal. Fog was still dense.

Our eyes had adjusted to fog by now. We drove for next couple of hours and finally visibility improved with the daybreak. By now Harry was totaly intoxicated with his 9th or maybe 10th peg. Stereo was blaring down punjabi numbers that I really doubt if any one understood. I could feel that I was tired and felt little sleepy. I changed seats with Shubh and took a powernap.

We stopped at foothills at Gyani's Dhaba. There were pictures of whole lot of celebrities who had stopped there and Iam sure must have vowed to never come back. Breakfast was bad. I had a half cooked ommelette with sleazy slices of half baked breads. Tea tasted like sugar water, while rest of us had Tandoori parathas that was filled with boiled potatoes and tasted like mud. We somehome filled our stomachs and proceeded to Shimla.

On the way we just stopped briefly to buy Vodka, that I was suppose to savour in higher grounds to protect myself from Chill, or was that just a pretext.
Innova started climbing up the hill and we started gaining the altitude. We had several things to say and laugh about throughout our trip. We all were just longing to see some snow.

Yash ji was good at handling the vehicle with good road sense. He already had come back from a trip to Manali and later we came to know had also been to Kasmir and Nepal. He started to open a bit and smiled at our stupid jokes sometimes. Its hilarious how one can laugh at almost anything during these trips.

I was anxious that my stomach would start churning as we gain altitude, since I had no clue what Giani's ommelette would do. We could clearly see the mountains at distance but still no snow. Pranav was continuesly checking the weather forecast on his Nokia GPRS. he had already informed us about the possible snowfall in higher mountains on 24th and 25th. We all were just hoping to be there on time.

We had crossed several small villages and hills by evening and were closing on Narkanda, this is the place where we were expecting some snow. As we drove further we could see small patches of snow on roadside which had turned muddy and looked dirty and slippary. air turned cold and all of us (excpet Harry) were staring right out of window to see the smallest bit of snow accumilated on the slopes. We could see the bigger mountains on horizon and some of them did look like snow capped. I was just wondering if we would go that far.

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