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Published: October 27th 2009
As well as, obviously, the time to write this blog and prune out the photos, I just spent about two-and-a-half hours trying to upload the photos and save the text, but every time Travelblog ate half of the comments and put the photos out of order. Then it ate my whole blog. So the photos are all out of order, you can probably work out where they should go, it should be Delhi -> Road to Manali -> Manali (and Vashist) -> Manali-Leh "Highway" -> Leh. About 1/3 of the photos are missing too. I can't spend any mroe time on it - if anyone knows a better blog site which doesn't steal one's copyright, please let me know.
I had less than two days - one night - in Delhi I stayed in Paharganj which is kind of the touristy part of Delhi, near the New Delhi train station. Delhi has a much nicer vibe about it than Mumbai, and here even though they all speak Hindi (unlike Mumbai which is a real hodge-podge of languages) most of the signs are in English, even in the suburbs; pretty much like Tamil Nadu really. I hear that there
Delhi
somewhere in the suburbs, snapped from the inside of the busare parts of India where not much is written in English, but i haven’t seen them yet, to me it seems that even where people can’t speak much English it seems to be the language of choice for writing books, road signs, advertisements, etc.
The annoying thing about Delhi though is that since it gets more tourists they have the touts. Indeed the “Main Bazar” road of Paharganj looks kind of like anywhere else in the world, it could almost be in Thailand somewhere although in Thailand you’d expect it to be a bit more orderly. The touts’ ploy here is to be really friendly and chat for a while before talking business. This is annoying because it’s harder to ignore someone who says “hello, where are you from?” than someone who says “would you like to look at my shop?”. After several conversations like this I learned to pretty much ignore them all:
“Hello, where are you from?”
“Australia”
“Ooh, nice place. Ricky Ponting. Been in India long?”
“Oh yes, months”
“And in Delhi?”
“oh yes, I’ve been here many times before”
“How do you like Delhi?”
“Well i don’t like the people always trying to sell me
Road to Manali
the picture looked washed-out because it was foggy stuff you know? It’s very annoying and bad for Delhi and bad for India”
“Yes, some people are like that they pick on the tourists and try to sell them things you know. So after Delhi where you go?”
“Probably up to Leh”
“Oh you should go to Srinagar. It’s very beautiful up there at this time of year”
“Yes I’ll think about it but first I think I’ll go to Leh”
“Well you should go to Srinagar. I have a nice place there just by the lake”
“What did I just say?”
“What?”
“I don’t want people trying to sell me stuff.”
“What, why are you like that, I’m not trying to sell you anything, just saying you could come and stay with my family”
“What, for free?”
“No not for free!”
“Well then you are trying to sell me something”.
... or similar conversations. So my normal strategy of talking to people who come up to chat, on the assumption that occasionally some are genuine, doesn’t work too well here. Still, they’re pretty good at getting around the blatant ignoring trick too - “hey I just want to talk to you. I’m a human being!” My normal
strategy of chatting until they mention anything commercial and then completely ignoring them seems to still work OK after a bit of practice.
Anyway even in Paharganj though it’s not overrun by Westerners and most people on the streets are still Indian. There’s still cows roaming around aimlessly, rubbish on the streets, beggars and filthy old ladies who could best be described as looking exactly like Popeye only shorter and without the pipe, carrying massive bags of garbage down the street. It’s also a favourite for trishaws which can weave in and out of the pedestrian and motorbike traffic better than most other forms of transport. It’s got the normal sort of shops you’d find in India, but more touristy shops, and even the normal ones have a touristy bent. There’s heaps of book shops, a palm-reader, heaps of restaurants and “fast food” places, chemists, camera shops, etc. Strangely enough there’s no guys peeing on walls.
Lots of touts seem to be selling trips to Srinagar. I guess this is either because of the hardships in this area a lot of them have ended up in Delhi; or perhaps it’s because tourism has dropped off because of the
terrorism there. I don’t know though if terrorist attacks have risen there, I actually thought they’d dropped off since 2001, but tourism is a fickle business. One of them tries to tell me
“Srinagar is beautiful, we have the highest mountain in the world”
“haha”
“What?”
“huh? The highest mountain in the world? Come on!”
“Well what is the highest mountain in the world then?”
“The highest mountain in the world? Mt Everest of course!”
“And where is that?”
“On the border of Tibet and Nepal of course”
He replied in that ‘just-because-you-have-all-the-facts-doesn’t-mean-you’re-right’ tone of voice which parents use when they’re losing an argument with their kids. “well you think you know so much about it then”. Well, yes, yes, I do. (Perhaps he was thinking of K2 which is of course the second-highest mountain in the world and is 215 km from Srinagar as the crow flies when it’s sober, but is in the Pakistan-controlled area, so in practical terms nowhere near Srinagar).
I booked a bus to Manali. There’s warnings in Lonely Planet and such-like about buying private bus trips from Delhi (because they are unreliable, not because they’re unsafe), but it’s a lot easier than trying
to find the public bus station, and in this case the buses are more frequent, so I booked a cheap ticket.
They told me to be ready at the hotel an hour before the bus was scheduled to leave, in the afternoon. So I waited at the hotel for an hour until about 15 minutes before the bus was scheduled to leave some big Sikh guy turned up, bundled me onto the back of his motorbike with all my stuff and dropped me off a few blocks away, and left, pointing me to another guy and telling me to stick with him. There were a heap of tourists there, but it turned out that they were all going to Dharamsala (I town I always thought sounded suspiciously like Dar es Salaam in Tanzania!), the home of the Dalai Lama. So after a while they left and I was the only one there waiting for the bus. The locals made me wait on a few different places (across the road, and back again), and about one-and-a-half hours after we were meant to leave they told me to get on this other tourist bus which would drop me off at the
Manali
looking across the top of The Mall, the main street right place. It was half-full of tourists, headed somewhere else.
This bus drove me through the suburbs of Delhi for about an hour, giving a brief view of the suburbs - crowded areas of small, messy, eateries; fancy houses; slums; business-people racing home from work; cows; guys peeing in strange urinals with three walls and no roof .... Delhi’s definitely more affluent than Mumbai (or, at least, got less really poor people - it may have less really rich people too?) but it’s definitely still colourful.
Anyway the bus dropped me off on a busy road (about a four-lane road that looks like a highway except for the traffic on it) with a couple of bunches of locals waiting aimlessly. By now it was getting dark. One guy who had a sort of generic Asian look turned out to be British. He was talking with a group of Buddhist monks (I feel like there should be a fancy collective noun for monks, you know like a “coven” of witches, a “parliament” of owls or a “pride” of lions, but I don’t know what it is...) in a foreign language. They looked Tibetan. He turned out to be British.
Apparently his wife is Indian (Tibetan) and she was unable to come but he was visiting her family.
I asked the bus guy where the bus was, the one which was supposed to have left two hours previously. “It’s very late” he said.
It got dark and we waited some more. Some people left on another bus, but apparently it was going somewhere else. An Indian came to me and asked me if I wanted to go on the fancy air-conditioned bus - “it’s a Volvo, very good bus” - and I replied that I wasn’t paying any more and was happy with the non-air-conditioned bus I’d paid for. “That bus is very very late” he said. After about another hour of waiting, just when I’d began to despair of there being a bus, the same little Indian guy bundled us all off half a block down the road to a big Volvo bus.
“They’re wanting us to pay 50 Rupees extra” said the generic Asian/British man. He’s probably getting local prices though.
“Well I told them I’m not paying anything extra” I said. Apparently it’s a common scam to either sell you a fancy air-conditioned ticket for
Manali
one of the two bridges across the river. Vashist is up the hill to camera right. two or three times the price of a local bus, and then take you to the bus station and put you on a local bus; or to sell you a bus ticket and then make you pay for upgrades.
Various local Indian guys bundled us quickly onto the bus - I think they were getting as impatient as me - there was only a couple of other tourists on the bus. Various Indian guys looked at my ticket and said stuff to each other in Hindi with the words “non-AC” in it, and stuck me down the back, without asking for more money. A couple of times people came and looked at my ticket and also said “blah blah blah non-AC blah blah Volvo blah blah”. Eventually the same little Indian guy as at the beginning came back to me. There was a German couple sitting a few rows in front of me and they paid I think it was 500 Rupees extra (not sure if that was each of together). The lady complained that she was paying for an air-conditioned coach when she’d rather not have air-conditioning since after all it was absolutely freezing (and also because the
Manali
the other bridge, with (I think) an auto driver going the wrong way across it (they're each one-way bridges) air-conditioning was pumped up so high the condensation on the windows prevented one seeing anything outside). Eventually he came to me and asked for some extra money (he didn’t say how much?!)
I pointed out that I’d already said I wasn’t paying anything extra.
“See your ticket says non-airconditioned”
“Yes, I told you I didn’t want to get on this bus I’m happy to wait for the non-airconditioned bus”
“This is a very good bus, it has Pullman seats and airconditioning. The non-airconditioned bus is very slow, always stopping, stopping, stopping. This one goes zoom, direct. And it has a TV”.
“Yes I know what this is, and I paid for the non-airconditioned bus. It’s up to you to run your business properly, to give me the bus I paid for, the one which is supposed to have left two hours ago”
“That bus is very late”
Yeah, like a day late, I suspected. I said, sweetly: “That’s OK, I’m in no hurry, I’m happy to wait”
He took my ticket and ran off, and that was the last I heard of it. I felt vindicated. It’s what Gandhi would have done,
Manali
walking up to Vashist ... those are tents in the distance I don't know why, and a group of young men playing by the river after all.
The bus took - I forget now, since I left this blog too late - about 14 hours I think, overnight. Unfortunately the first half of the journey was at night, in the dark, so I didn’t see much. By morning, though, we were winding up into the mountains. Thankfully they turned the airconditioning down soon after we left Delhi or we’d all have frozen to death, and they didn’t play too many Bollywood hits on the TV. The scenery up in the hills became quite nice, and closer to Manali the bus had trouble negotiating some of the curves, and you started seeing farmers with herds of goats walking down the street. Delhi is already further North than some people think, and fairly close to the foothills of the mountains.
We eventually got into Manali and of course there’s the regular touts around the bus station. Later I found them not as bad, in other places. There’s no need to get an
auto from the bus station to the town centre as it’s only one kilometre walk. Manali is clearly built for tourists, but most are Indian tourists. It seems like a nice spot for
Manali
walking up to Vashist a week away, specially if you’re from a hot, tropical, area. It’s fairly clean except for the mangy dogs sitting in the middle of the mall, has nice eateries and shops selling all sorts of Tibetan handicraft or Buddhist or Hindu artwork. There’s a couple of towns within walking distance, Vashist and Old Manali, which have their own particular feel. To me, Vashist felt like what I’d expect a Nepali village to look like, and felt sort of genuine even though it seemed to have a lot of backpackers. Manali is set on a river, and there’s some pretty high mountains right behind it. I think its altitude is about 2000 metres. Even then, in early October, there was snow on the mountains.
So Manali is the centre for heaps of adventure activities. It was kind of the wrong season to try any of them, but travel places are still advertising white-water-rafting, trekking, day trips, rock-climbing, etc. I toyed with the idea of doing a paragliding course but I didn’t really have time, and it was expensive, which are both handy excuses for my fear of heights. In the end I hung around Manali for several days, and then
Vashist
Through the restaurant window booked a “private bus” ticket to Leh.
Leh is the capital of Ladakh, one of the 560-odd Princely States that back at the time of partition (in 1947) had to make a choice between being part of India or part of Pakistan. It’s actually part of the state of Jammu & Kashmir (I guess the name “Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh” was too unwieldy), which in particular had an interesting problem in this regard - at the time they had a Hindu ruler but a Muslim majority. The ruler decided to align them with Pakistan and they’ve now spent the next 60 years trying to reverse that decision. You’d probably know how several “hot” wars and a long terror campaign (now being fought largely by Afghanistan-hardened foreign jihadis) have been fought over Jammu & Kashmir (26562 people killed, mainly Indians, during 1990-2000) despite India’s very conciliatory approach to Pakistan, and so worry about me going there, but the point is that Ladakh is completely different, at least the Leh area. This isn’t because Ladakhis don’t have a right to worry about their geopolitical situation - there’s been pressure to take them out of the state of J&K, as they
Vashist
main street really have nothing in common culturally, historically or geographically with the rest of the state, and to make them a “union territory”, but this isn’t happening. I guess it’s just that Buddhsts really are less inclined to blow other people up to achieve their political ends. Funny about that.
Anyway, the point is Leh is a safe and happy place as long as you don’t go there via Srinagar. Northern India is also dominated by Israeli tourists, I don’t quite understand why. They seem to like going via Srinagar (there’s two roads into Leh, the difficult one from Manali - more about this later - and the easier one from Srinagar). I suggested to one that this was a bit crazy not just because of the general risk of going to Srinagar, but because Jews are probably not terribly welcome in a fairly fundamentalist Muslim area. “Ah well” he said “We’re Israeli, we’re used to terrorism”. Which I guess is true.
So the public busses had already stopped running - they only run over summer - but I was able to get a seat on a private bus. This only cost Rs 300 (about $AUS 7) which was
Vashist
some sort of temple cheap. It did it all in one day, scheduled to be about 17 hours, whereas the public busses apparently break it up into two days, camping overnight in Keylong to acclimatise to the altitude.
The bus was scheduled to leave at 02:00 a.m. I was supposed to be waiting at the hotel entrance about 15 minutes before that. I set my alarm for 12:55 and went to sleep early.
I was awakened by the sound of a vehicle driving down the small laneway next to us, and mangy dogs barking, which is quite common. I looked at my watch and it was 01:45. I raced downstairs but couldn’t see anyone. I waited around for a few minutes, raced upstairs, packed quickly (I’d packed most of my things the night before) and raced back downstairs again. Still nobody. I waited for about 20 minutes and decided they must have come and gone, and went back to bed, annoyed at my alarm clock (phone) for not waking me. Eventually I worked out the problem - one of the dumbest things I’ve done - I’d set the alarm for 12:55 rather than 00:55!
I was just falling asleep thinking about
Vashist
touristy vendors buying another ticket for the next night when there was a timid knock on my door, and someone there who couldn’t speak English saying something about a taxi. Eventually he came back with someone who could speak English and we ascertained that they were indeed here for my bus. I raced downstairs and into the bus, and off we went. It turned out there was only me and one other guy on this private bus. They can’t be making much money on it if we both only paid $7! The bus was a 14-seater, with no side doors (ie sitting in the back, I had to climb out over the front passenger seat every time I wanted to get out. This would be annoying if there were an accident or if there were actually 14 people on board.
The road to Leh is an experience. This is the main reason I came up here. It’s billed as the second-highest “motorable” pass in the world, although discussion on the web suggests that this is not true (maybe it depends on your definition of “motorable”?) although I don’t think anyone debates that it gets up to 5328 metres above sea level.
I always find that long trips like that sort of blend together in the memory so now a few weeks later I find it hard to remember every stage. It was nearly 15 hours of variable quality road, sometimes sealed, usually very potholed, sometimes wet, almost always winding, and a few times just wide enough for one vehicle and carved out of the edge of a cliff which soared hundreds of metres above us and below us, like the Road to Solla Sollew in the Dr Seuss book. There were heaps of military checkpoints - I think the military have a role in keeping the road open - and little towns along the way, often with a surprising number of hotels. There were rivers and cliffs and mountains. There was one point with 21 hair-pin bends and a wrecked truck that had missed one of them near the top somewhere and rolled to the bottom. I don’t know why they call it a “highway” - most of it isn’t sealed, none of it has line markers. I guess “highway” has some technical meaning because it runs between different states or something.
The road is popular to ride on Royal
Manali-Leh "highway"
where we stopped first, just as the sun came up Enfield motorbikes. There’s a Royal Enfield club in Manali, and travel companies in both Manali and Leh will organise tours to do this. I met a few people who were doing it independently, hiring bikes and riding it. On the road we saw two people cycling the road, which I thought would be a Herculean task, but back in Delhi I met someone who’d done it and said it’s not too hard because most of the road isn’t that steep. Still, I think it’s pretty impressive, since I could hardly walk a few metres in the altitude, but I guess you get adjusted to it.
The sharpest bit is at the beginning, ascending from Manali up into the mountains. From there it’s actually relatively flat. At the beginning, while it was still dark, we saw one overturned truck, and another one abandoned on the side of the road with oil leaking out of its axle. Unfortunately I couldn’t get a photo of them as it’s a fairly iconic image for this road. About an hour into the journey we got stuck behind a convoy of trucks. Two or three drivers were shouting something in Ladakhi (I think) to a
guy sitting in his seat in his truck. It was a heated conversation and they began hitting him with sticks. They all seem to carry canes with them. He wasn’t getting out of the vehicle but every time he stuck his head out to say something or his arm got close to the window, one of the guys would hit with his thick, one-and-a-half metre long stick with all his might. Some young guy came out with a metal rod or bar of some description but luckily didn’t hit anybody with it.
Someone else ran up and tried to make peace, and after a few more violent whacks with the sticks, and someone pointing to a small spot of something red (perhaps blood?) on the side of the truck, they all went back to their trucks and carried on. We tried to ask our driver what the problem was but he wasn’t very talkative (and not fluent in English) and just said something about overtaking. I guess if you have a two-hour drive on a dark, dangerous, road before the next overtaking lane, it kind of matters who gets in front and if someone in front is driving too
slow.
Once we got up above 4500 metres or so (all the signs were suddenly in feet, unlike everywhere else in India) I started to feel the altitude a bit. Apparently altitude sickness actually affects you worse if you are young and fit, so I had a distinct advantage - you could say I’d been training for altitude my whole life! Still, I began to feel kind of tired, more so than from the time of day, and lapsed into a strange sleep where I was still half-awake. Even in Leh, later, when acclimatised, I noticed that my dreams were different, which other people also report. Half-way into the trip, we passed a sign telling us how many kilometres it was till Leh and I found that I could not calculate if we were half-way yet or not, without actually writing the numbers down and looking at it. That’s definitely the altitude.
A few hours earlier, we stopped for momos around lunchtime and found it difficult to walk any distance, and that we felt a bit euphoric as well. You don’t really notice it while just sitting in the bus in a daze. The driver had some problem
Manali-Leh "Highway"
a rare stretch of good road with our bus and so we ended up sitting here for about an hour while they fiddled around underneath the bus. I think there was even some welding going on but I might remember that wrong. When we left, the driver seemed to have no clutch, and had to crash-change the gears, which was tricky when overtaking or being overtaken on a road not quite wide enough for two cars. After an hour or so, though, he seemed to regain control of the clutch.
It was a beautiful road though, with lovely scenery. There were a number of times that me and the other passenger just looked at each other with that “I can’t believe we’re in the Himalayas” look. I didn’t get too great photos of the trip because the bus shook around too much, but I’ve put up a few anyway, enough to get an idea, I guess. I don’t want to give the impression that the whole lot was perched on the edge of cliffs, indeed after ascending from Manali the road was fairly flat, and they use an inordinate amount of hairpin bends so it’s never actually too steep. Still there were some scary bits
particularly near the end, and I was a bit surprised at our driver’s penchant for driving right out on the left hand side (the road there isn’t wide enough for two cars anyway, so why not drive a few inches away from the sheer cliff drop?)
The funny thing along this road is the roadsigns. Earlier on in the trip they were long and because of the way I was seated in the back seats of the bus I usually couldn’t read them all (they’re written small - they were more serious, about the beautiful land, or something), but as we got closer to Leh they became more succinct. Here are some of them (with my immediate thoughts), remembering that drink-driving is a big problem here and that the roads are treacherous so one shouldn’t drive too fast (any spelling mistakes are as per the originals):
DON’T BE A GAMA IN THE LAND OF LAMA (what??)
DRINKING WHISKY MAKES DRIVING RISKY (I’m a beer man myself)
KNOW AIDS NO AIDS (well not in the biblical sense!)
IF YOU ARE MARRIED DIVORCE SPEED (nope, speed and I are only dating)
LOVE THE NEIGHBOUR BUT NOT
Manali-Leh "Highway"
another rare stretch of good road. There are no photos of normal road because we were bounching around too much for me to be able to take photos of that. WHILE DRIVING (I don’t think that’s what it meant!)
DRIVING AND DAYDREAMING DO NOT GO TOGETHER (nor any sort of dreaming for that matter!)
MOUNTAINS ARE A PLEASURE ONLY IF YOU DRIVE WITH LEISURE
STOP GOSSIPING, LET HIM DRIVE (that’s tellin’ her !)
ALERT TO LIFE, ROUGH TO DEATH (what does that even mean?)
REACH FOR THE STARS EVEN IF YOU HAVE TO STAND ON CACTUS (wait, I think you’ve mixed your metaphors)
ALWAYS ALERT AVOID ACCIDENTS (this written in four lines, with the one big A for all of them just in case we didn’t notice the alliteration)
I AM CURVACEOUS, BE SLOW (ha!)
BETTER TO BE MR LATE THAN THE LATE MR
OVERSPEED IS A KNIFE THAT CUTS A LIFE (yes, but underspeed is a gate that makes you late!)
But before that, we got to the highest pass in the road, where we stopped for a photo. It didn’t feel that much higher as we’d been around 4500-5000 metres most of the way already. Still, it was much colder than where we’d stopped for lunch. It’s basically been a year since any cold weather, as I had
Australian spring and summer, and then travelled through the tropics and into the northern hemisphere’s summer, so I wasn’t really used to cold weather. I also didn’t have all that much thick clothe. It was probably only -5 C, but with the altitude and the wind, it made the stop at the putative second-highest pass in the world fairly uncomfortable. I think I said words to the effect of “Forsooth, verily this is a place of exceeding cold, it chilleth me to my very bones”. At least that’s how I remember it, thanks to the altitude.
After that it was pretty much downhill, then our first glimpse of the mighty Indus river, not so mighty at this stage, and a stop for spot of bureaucracy (a form asking for our passport details and whether or not we have swine ‘flu’) and then into Leh, a nice place at an altitude of only 3500 metres, exceedingly cold, which I’ll write about in the next blog.
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M Suresh
non-member comment
Very Good Blog
Hi,It's been nice reading your blog.