Back to Manali

14.08.2008 to 18.08.2008

We had a 03:45 wake up call the day we left Leh, luckily the weather was fine. The four of us (the other two being, Mirko and Giulia) set off for a 15 minute walk to the bus stand. The bus trip was very different from the one we had towards Leh... in a negative way.

First of all the minivan was much more comfortable than the HPDTC bus. Though much smaller the seats were somehow more comfortable, and this taking into consideration that we had booked the best seats on the bus. Janet's seat, though push back, kept going up all the time. The time we spent on the road in total amounted to 25 hours, with a staggering 18 hour on the first day... this compared to the 15 hours we had done with the minivan. The amount of stops were excessive... every time someone wanted to pee all the people in the bus went down, and took photos, smoked cigarettes, etc etc. The worst part came in the evening. We arrived at the camp in Keylong at around 10 at night and went to choose a tent. The tents had three beds inside and they pretended us to share the tent with a stranger, which obviously we did not accept since we had specifically told them that we were expecting a 2 person tents before we booked the trip. The tent's linen was all damp as well... unlike the extreemly comfortable tents we had in Sarchu. Both dinner and breakfast were quite disgusting.

The next day the road was in a very bad condition and Yakof was sick with a temperature of a 101. Since we had left Manali there had been a lot

of rain, making the road's state, very poor. At a particular point the road could not be seen at all with the fog!! We also had to stop for around an hour waiting for workers to mend a bridge which had broken down... very nice... though we must say we were lucky as a friend of ours stopped for two hours waiting for a landslide to clear.

We finally arrived in Manali, exhausted, and headed to the same hotel we had slept before we left to Leh. Though we were not planning to spend much time in Manali we ended up spending four nights as both of us were down with the flu!! Janet was quite upset as she realised she had left her ipod in the tent at Keylong. When we tried calling them they said they did not find anything, but from the questions they asked us, we realised they were not necessarily saying the truth. The reason why she was upset most was that , in the i-pods' pouch she had a small elephant Yakof had bought to her, back in Cambodia. But well... We spent some time with Mirko and Giulia in Vashist before saying our goodbyes. We will miss these guys, and would have loved to spend more time with them.

When we were both recovered we headed towards our next destination... Mc Leod Ganj.