Advertisement
Published: August 25th 2015
Edit Blog Post
We left at 9am-ish and arrived the following day! The drive took that long we stopped overnight at a smaller en route town. Then we never actually went into Manali. We swerved it. There's a main street that runs right through the centre. And we took one that runs parallel skirting the town. Hahaha.
However, I was docious to the whim of the OM family. 'Where next?' I only answer with a shrug of the shoulders. Honestly, they simply couldn't go wrong. Firstly there is only 1 road through the steep Himalayan valley but then once in the vicinity of Manali you can drive on whatever road going wherever and you won't start thinking the grass is green elsewhere, it's all green.
Also, Manali is upmarket and expensive. I'm pretty sure that was a factor in their thinking. 'Bery bery expensib' describing a nearby hotel, 'tea 300 rupees'. As a reference, little less than Starbucks.
So the drive was 223km, for the observant, yes we went excruciatingly slowly, without any rest-bite from the torturously bad roads, huge potholes, terrible driving and other terrible drivers. A boy racer might want to test his/her mettle on these roads, guaranteed they
Indian road users
No matter what you drive, they are King of the road. would be dead before the end of the day. How we didn't even get bumped or scratched once is beyond me. I think the extended vocabulary of the car horn has something to do with it. I haven't managed to translate all its idiosyncracies. But it's like morse code. You need to analyze the length and number of 'beeps' to extract the meaning. I'm sure 'how's it going?' is in there. And also a cordial reply.
However. No questions, the most beautiful and interesting extended drive I've ever experienced. If your ever gonna do it, don't use the bus. Pay someone to take you, roll the window down, pre-charge mp3, good set of headphones, and enjoy the ride. A junkie's solution to drugs. The kids next to me literally fought the whole way. This should have been irritating especially when Mitu got bored and tried to work out how to switch my mp3 off but I was speechlessly chilled.
To improve things further, there were regular food and chai stops. Using my very limited experience, in
my nutshell, Indian food goes like this. Punjabi prantha (2 slices of roti with something in between i think normally potatoes flattened)
Dhaba
'Rashpal, would you describe a dhaba as a cafe or restaurant?', 'hmmm...eating place.' for b'fast, mo mos as snacks, mealtimes; rice and roti (flatbread) with a potato, vegetable, or lentil based spice. And a yogurt based spice, is known as 'curry'. And I always thought curry was a generic name for any Indian dish?! I'm not saying this cos everyone says this about India and I feel I should. But the best food I've ever had. Why British curry houses ever morphed their own cooking is either a poor reflection on us or a tasteless joke. The best way I can describe it, normally chillies are used to make things hot (to be clear if spicy not necessarily hot), and so you could remove the chillies next time you cook if you'd prefer it not hot, makes sense. Hot Indian food I don't think works like this. If you were to remove the chillies or make it 'not hot' you remove the dish completely. And that goes for any spice, you can't just remove one or two and keep the dish. It's the blend which makes the magic.
It was funny. Before finding the hotel we were asking about first. Every time Reeta would tell me to keep my head down. I'm
Hotel
A view of the hotel we stayed at, the garden was beautiful, cute shelters, and full of flowers which people around Manali seemed to take great pride in a 'gora'. I guess the word for white person, not sure if it insinuates negative or positive connotations, for sure though there's a separate price for foreigners. A general observation, many Indians try to speak to me in Hindu, obviously disappointed, but I get the sense if you know the language your not pure 'gora'. Anyway I was happy keeping my head down. I would occasionally risk a sneak peak then a few slaps on the head from a giggling Mitu, 'head down, head down', oh so you do speak English. Eventually we got this really nice place. And yes we shared a room. It felt pretty strange walking into the
hotel room. Soo where am I sleeping? Luckily there was a separate single. The views were amazing, only beaten by the food, if I'd been on my own I would have turned it into an all you can eat. I'm a 'gora', don't want to add greedy to my adjectives.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.075s; Tpl: 0.016s; cc: 5; qc: 44; dbt: 0.0353s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb