Day 02: 11th June 2013:-Chandigarh - Manali

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Chandigarh to Kullu/Manali Driver requested that we leave the hotel by 8 am in the morning. He had said depending on traffic we might have a commute of 9 to 12 hours. Note how broad the range is. I was skeptical about this. By end of that night, I realized how this is an acceptable range here. First for the breakfast and Taj. It was excellent. They serve a combined North, South and Continental style breakfast. One thing that was missing was Oat meal. Both Sandhya and I wanted to try it here but could not. Here is a case of "eager to please". Pranav wanted hot sauce for the omelette. For some reason the waiter understood this differently. Out came chocolate sauce in a bowl for Pranav! Kids went ga-ga over cold coffee. After a full breakfast of uthappam, idli, dosai podi, omelette, fruits etc, we vacated the room. The suitcases automatically got transported to the car. We left Chandigarh hotel at 8:10 am . The city seems to have good part and a bad part. Once the Government area was over we could see narrow roads and unorderly traffic. Our tour guide Mustafa is a young fellow with bit of a temper. We had an incident where the light was turning yellow and Mustafa crossed the intersection. A family in two scooters were also attempting to cross from other side. A collision was averted but tempers flared. One of the passengers in the other scooter was the scooter driver's mom. She was able to subdue the situation. After 45 minutes or so we were on a road to Manali. Well, it is a two way road with towns jutting out every few miles. One interesting thing to note. On the way, in couple of places, Gurudwara volunteers were distributing free water. Our driver was able to use that. We drove for another 2.5 hours without any incident. Traffic was getting worse as we headed toward the mountains. We stopped in a restaurant for lunch. As usual the driver gets a free meal for bringing customers. We had tandoori rotis and some subji. All of us ate for about 600 rupees. It may not be a complete lunch but good enough for travel. Road serpentined through many hills and hence we would climb one and come down to climb the other. Many places have no gaurd rails. Two way traffic and unmaintained roads amde it very interesting. Pranav, who was sitting 'shotgun' made this comment - my heart stopped at least 10 times'. We reached the area of Mandi. This area is called the pahad. There are two rivers that run through here. Parbati and Beas. The road follows one of the rivers. By now, we were stopping every few meters to allow the oncoming traffic or to avoid unpaved areas of the road. The river in some areas gets narrow and makes excellent rapids. It started raining as well around 4 PM. The driver stopped for tea and covered our luggage on the rack with tarpaulin. By 5 PM we reached Kullu. Here we stopped to see how shawls are being made. This is famous city for shawls. We left Kullu around 5:45pm and headed to Manali as our last destination. The distance is a mere 50 km. It took us well over 3 hours to reach the hotel. The last 10 kms took us more than an hour because of the city road traffic and rain. We were exhausted by then. I can imagine how the driver would be. The stay is in 'Manu Allaya', one of the top hotels in Manali. We were entertained with welcome drinks and shown to our rooms with river views. We walked to the balcony and could hear the river loud and clear. But we could not see anything else. We were all very tired. We wanted to finish the dinner and get to bed. We chose buffet dinner here. They had live music in the buffet hall. Food was OK with mix of Indian, Italian, etc. We quickly finished dinner and went to bed.

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Comments

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[shalini]

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