Day 10 - Khargil to Leh

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Got up at 4:00am by now getting up at 4 has become a habbit and all of us are getting up 5-10mns before our alarms go off.

Got ready and packed all the bags and put them on our bikes and this time to prevent dust we covered them with plastic garbage bags. We left our hotel “Hotel d’Zojila, Kargil” at 6:30am. We fueled up all the bikes just outside Kargil.

Since we had got a message from prithvi that the roads between Kargil and Leh was good we were pretty excited.

But to our surprise the roads were very bad as bad as the roads that we had encountered yesterday.
As a matter of fact 75% of the entire stretch the roads were non existent. We reached Mulbek which is just about 35 kms from kargil at 8:30am. The culture since we entered J&K before Srinagar which was totally Islamic had now changed to Buddism. We could see those huge circular barrels which we see in Buddhist temples on the road sides. We had breakfast at Mulbek and left immediately.
We passed a couple of passes nearly namely Namikala (12198) and Fotula (13479) feet high. JP’s bike started giving some problem tried to fix it by adjusting the gap of the sparkplug and the air screw in the carburetor but in vain and we decided to carry on. We decided that the next stop would be Lamayaru and we would have lunch there.

On the way I had a fall trying to avoid a big ditch and Ravish’s bike and hurt my ankle a bit. I had no choice but to carry on riding. We reached Lamayaru at 1:20pm and found out that the temple was closed and would reopen at 2:00pm. Hence we decided to have lunch and went on and saw the monestry. Then we visited Lamayaru Gompa and left Lamayaru at 2:30pm and decided we will drive continuously to Leh with just a short tea break.

We took a short 10 min tea break about 9 kms before Nimmu and we found out that the road after Nimmu is very good.

We were really happy to see that roads were wide and well laid after Nimmu and it was better than any of the NHs we had seen till now. This road took us through the Indus valley and had some beautiful scenes. Well every second of our ride since we left Srinagar is picturesque and we feel like taking pictures all the time. This whole region is almost like desert and mountains are all sand like in texture and very dusty and brow. We get to see shades of brown. Just about 20 kms before Leh we found the spot called Magnetic hill, were we see that vehicles seem to defy gravity and when put on neutral without breaks they roll uphill without any effort. This was a cool phenomenon.

Then we left Magnetic hill and reached Leh by about 7pm.

We covered the total distance of 223 kms from Kargil to Leh in almost 11 hrs.

We had reserved rooms at a place called The Leh Chen, but were pretty upset when we reached to find out as the rooms were full we were accommodated in an alternative place called Thongsal. Then after we checked in the owner of the “Mehtab” was very kind and offered to take me to the hospital. We went to the SN (Sonam Norbu) Memorial hospital the doctor saw me in the opd and told me it was just a sprain and there was nothing to worry and asked me to put crape bandage on the ankle and take antiinflamatory tablets for 2 days.They charged Rs. 2 totally.

My odo reads a total of 1482kms.

Photos of Day 10

https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/sredir?uname=pottumarthi&target=ALBUM&id=5624634166615441905&authkey=Gv1sRgCP2ir7C6_O_rtgE&feat=email

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