Tuesday, 11 August 2009

Manali Day I

The hotel was situated right in the middle of old manali atop a small hill which required a small 5 minutes climb, which rather seemed like Everest at that point of time after the 14 hour volvo ride. Surrounded by the old manali market below, the place at the top was quite quaint, peaceful and relaxing to the soul and the market below seemed like the place to roam.. The rooms simply had a bed and a loo, 400 bucks sasta tikaao, awesome view of the mountains and a bit of green around to add that li’l bit of nature real value for money. Perfect place to laze around and dope whole day as was obvious, we took to the place easy but left the doping up to the firangis as we already had our gudang garam plus chai to get high.


We unpacked and loitered a bit, while having our kaam chalaoo chowmein & omlette breakfast we asked Raju about ladakh, keylong and rohtang. After hearing the distance and time ratio for ladakh & keylong we decided to stick to rohtang as the main course along with river side beer guzzling as the side dish for our trip. To our surprise Raju turned out to be the owner of the place along with the regular dope supplier for the Firangis buzzing around at the place. A number of maalishwala’s eyed us trying to sell their handy work, Along with the sadhus with chillum and jataas we had our rehearsal of hare rama hare krishna all set.


We set out ready with beer cans and cameras packed, after exploring old manali a bit we reached the river side, the ice cool water was enough to chill our beers and bones to ice.
Sitting on that river side, drinking beer, feeling the cool splashes along with the few drops of slow rain relaxed us after the night long journey. Puneet decided to try a few antics and Avnish did a few river side dances while Verma and me quietly contemplated at what lies beneath these sheets of water clear like slides of glass and cold as ice. The fresh air had got us hungry and we headed for mall road trekking through the nature park


The nature park was a peaceful experience, a quite walk through a forest with only wild dogs and birds, the place was something out of a love song shot in a jungle for some hindi movie. The walk was filled with funny photos and scary stories about man eating trees along with punters explanation on how he wants to use his gifted knife to pull of a Man vs Wild(ala Bear Grylls) and how he hasn’t even cut a lemon with it till now.
Upon reaching Mall road we chose chinese as our poison and chopsticks as our weapon of choice at CHOPSTICKS. Post our hogging we booked ourselves a taxi to rohtang and roamed the market for some intense minutes.

One thing was consistent over all the places be it old manali or new, racism. The place was full of Israelis, Swiss, Europeans & Americans i.e Foreigners and were treated mostly like a sardar would be treated in Punjab. These guys form the steady income flow for the people of manali and therefore they had become people of manali themselves. Wherever we went the local shopkeepers and restaurant owner showed least interest because we were Indians, the irony of reverse racism left me dwelling as we headed back to Raju’s hotel through the nature park for a hot cup of tea along with cigarette and an early sleep in for next morning 6 o’clock trip to Rohtang.

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