We decided to dedicate a whole chapter to this road trip, as it is one of the most amazing trips we have ever experienced.
Janet compared the Himalayas to a beautiful woman, wearing rich clothes and adorned with precious jewellery. When looking at her, she takes your breath away... never have we seen anything of such comparable beauty. Slowly and delicately, this lovely woman starts removing her jewellery and clothing, but, irrespective of what garment she is removing, her beauty remains untouched... until she is totally naked. Her beauty remains intact, glowing as ever. Both of her profiles are equally beautiful, perfect and unique. Nothing can spoil her perfection, her eternal beauty. This is the Himalayan range...
The mountains are of a mesmerising beauty. At the beginning of our trip their colour was mostly green. As we proceeded the colours started changing to various other shades, including softer greens, browns, beige, yellows... until they were actually bare at last. But even in their bareness they were breathtaking... the colours of the rocks changing continuously, with different reflections according to the time of day... browns, oranges, reds... we could not stop looking at their magnificence.
The first day we spent nine hours on the road. We had an hour delay in the morning as there was a german guy who did not want to move from our seat. He insisted to be refunded as he had booked a big bus not a small minivan. Eventually, his travel agent came to meet him, and they resolved the matter. The trip was not as bad as we thought it would be and the weather was very favourable, although we felt very lucky to have gone through the road with Ciri before as the weather in the Nathula Pass was much better then. We arrived at our camp in Sarchu by five o'clock in the afternoon.
Sarchu is at an altitude of around 4,000 m and is not inhabited apart from these tents set-ups. Here we found out that, as a couple, we had to pay Rs700 for a tent, dinner and breakfast when we had been told that tents prices start from Rs250 (per tent not per person)!!! Given we had no other choice we had to settle for this arrangement.
The meal was quite nice and, though it was extremely cold, we managed to spend a good night sleep. Janet woke up a couple of times breathless but that was it. The next morning we woke up for breakfast at around seven in the morning. The breakfast was good: chapati, omlette and tea. Immediately after breakfast we set off for the second part of our journey. The weather was good but the road was in a worse state than the first day. Luckily we had a very good driver. He had only two faults. Fault number 1 : he hated having cars in front of him... as soon as he saw one at a distance he would start hooting and pressing the gas to overtake. This fault led sometimes to fault number two : he hated conventional roads. Wherever he could he would take shortcuts, sometimes just making one crazy detour and scaring the shit out of us. Apart from that....he got us to Leh safe and sound on the second day at around 15:30. 
No comments:
Post a Comment