Friday, November 11, 2011

Enfield Part 2

After the first part of my trip I headed back to Rishikesh to regroup and get a few issues worked out with the bike. Of course dealing with stuff in India takes time, so I got a bit of a late start on the day I left. Rode until about 4pm, when I saw large black clouds forming ahead of me. Oh shit, find shelter! Found a scuzzy looking hotel just in time before the skies opened up. This would have hurt:


The next day I made it up to Gangotri, the headwaters of the Ganga. Here's a shot looking down the valley during the drive up:


What a stunningly beautiful place! Huge peaks all around, but a much narrower valley than at Badrinath, so you only get occasional glimpses of them. Without knowing, I made it just in time, as the whole town closed down just a few days after I was there. I spent two nights, and the day in between I hiked as far as I could manage up a side-valley. Rugged hiking at over 3000m when I've gotten used to sea level.


From Gangotri, I needed to backtrack all the way to where I spent the first night, then from there I could head northwest along mountain roads towards the Ton river and eventually on to Bilaspur, for my friend Vipin's wedding. I needed to hurry so I'd have time to see as much as possible, but I was really tempted to stay a night in this place, just 20km down the valley from Gangotri:


After many kilometers on some amazing mountain roads, and some awful mountain roads as well; and after a memorably horrible hotel in a shithole called Rohru, I decided to scrap a part of my planned route and go to Shimla. Shimla is an old British hill station, and it's a tourist trap, but it's probably the cleanest town I've been to in India, and it was a good rest after too much time on the bike. From there it was a quick hop to Bilaspur for the wedding. If you've been to an Indian wedding you'll know that there is a lot of drinking involved. Me+alcohol+camera=bad news, so I don't have any pictures of the wedding, but I had a great time, met some awesome people, and learned more about the culture of Himachal Pradesh...and I got drunk. After two days of Arvind telling me to have "just one more", I was finally able to escape the madness and headed to Manali, where I met this guy:


Manali sits high in the Beas river valley, at the foot of the famous Rohtang Pass. It's another touristy place, but it's really a gorgeous setting and I was lucky enough to be too late for the main tourist season; meaning I got a nice room for cheap and didn't have to put up with too many dreadlocks and baba pants. The weather wasn't great my first day there, and I needed to sort out a broken shock on the bike, so I waited until my second day to ride up the pass. I really lucked out as the weather was perfect, and I'm pretty sure the pass shut down for the season a couple days after I was there as a big storm came in. Here's a shot from the way up the pass, you can see the road switchbacking up on the upper-left:


Made it to the top! Around 4000m:


Went a few switchbacks down the backside just to get a better view. It's stunning scenery, and it convinced me that I have to come back and do the whole ride over to Ladakh. Until this point I was planning on selling the bike when I left, but this made me decide to keep it so I can come back next year and do that ride.


On the way back to Manali I saw a sign for a ski area and had to check it out. The terrain looked quite boring, but evidently they ski on something other than snow...

Thursday, November 03, 2011

Reflections

I am not a spiritual person, but if you insist that I have a soul, I will, in turn, insist that it resonates not to the metronome of some higher power, but instead to the cacophonous rhythm of nature. The mountains are my cathedrals, the trees my minarets, the snow my holy water, the desert rocks my altars. The appreciation of natural beauty is not some conceit constructed by the human mind, but the inescapable result of our origin; proof that we do not stand separate, but are an integral part of the natural world.