Skiing, at Last
Sorry to disappoint you all. This travelogue is not much fun reading. As it is, the trip was not really eventful unless TV falling head first while skiing is your idea of an event. So, this will be short and matter-of-fact.
So, after checking tribuneindia.com for snowfall that had happened and accuweather.com for snowfall that would happen, I decided the time was right to head north. KP was the head of the pack this time and mind you, it was quite an unusual pack: KP, Mangalam, Nitendra, Raghu and TV other than me. So, you see, not many regulars in the group and to add to that a bit more diverse than usual.
So, we booked ourselves on an HPTDC bus both ways and were on our way to Manali. (Solang being our final destination.) Tip of the trip: Avoid HPTDC bus. They are not worth half the money they charge. I am sure you can find private buses that are much better and I am not too sure they charge as much. Well, so our bus took its own sweet time to reach Manali, 15 hours to be precise. And for the entertainment of the passengers, the bus had screeching brakes that the driver was quite fond of. However, as compared to the comfort-level of travel in my trips, this was royal class travel.
So, we reached Manali sometime before 11 and after a brief discussion proceeded towards Solang. Well, a bit of detail of the discussion would be insighful to understand the diverseness of the group. So, there were 3 of us (Nity, TV and me of course) who wanted to stay away from the big towns as much as possible even at the expense of some comfort. The rest of the three believed otherwise. Because of our better persuasive skills, we won Round 1 and proceeded towards Solang. At this point in time, it would be apt to note that Nity did not puke even a single time during the journey. For the significance of this achievement, the reader is directed towards another of my travelgue "Dip to Scale the Wall", which was such an eventful one that I could not devote much space to Nity's puke rate of 1every 5 km or so.
But let us stick to the basic facts and keep this one short. So, on the first day, the first group proceeded towards Dhundhi, a small trek of 7 kms. For reasons that I am not quite sure of, the remaining three stayed there for a brief skiing stint. The trek was nothing to talk about as we had a wide road, well a narrow road but an expressway as far as trekking is concerned. After crossing a few of the valleys, we decided to go back because of the persistent crib from TV regarding weather going bad, road going bad etc etc. For the information of the readers, Dhundhi is the first half of the Beas Kund trek, an easy grade trek in summers but maybe not quite so in winters.
So, the next day was reserved for skiing and that is what we did. Oh, by the way, we stayed at Hotel IceLand at Solang, which had "very very basic rooms" to borrow the phrase from Raghu. Some of us would consider that as comfortable and some would consider it as luxurious becuase of the running hot water the hotel had. Well, it is a reasonable accomodation good enough for all/most kinds of people. We hired a ski instructor the next day and promptly proceeded to ignore him buoyed by the success of our first attempt down the slope. However, most of us managed to get some amount of skiing under our belt, Nity having the sensational achievement of coming down the blue slope at a reasonable pace without any falls. Yours truly managed to learn the art of changing direction at will. Tip No 2 Don't try to perfect wedging. Just practise coming down the slope and soon enough you would realise that the only thing you need to stop or change direction is to think that you want to stop and like magic, it will happen. In fact, in my third trip down, I had to absolutely stop unless I wanted to crash right into a group of people and improve the event quotient of the trip. And suddenly, I just moved my right leg across, (well something like that, don't ask me exactly what) and whoosh I took a 90' turn and stopped. Well, don't start clapping. It was nothing as spectacular as it sounds. Morale of the story is "If you just keep on doing it, you will suddenly discover it." Actually, coming to think of it, I learnt my skating in exactly the same way. Never ever saw anybody else skate before learning it. Well, the other achievements were:
1) TV going down head-first.
2) My learning to walk up a slope with skiis on.
Well, that is the end of the story. What, Don't tell me it is abrupt and I should tell you what happened the next day. We came back to Manali to try our hands err legs at ice-skating. Unfortunately, that was not to be as we were told no ice-skates on hire for grown-ups. We just trekked around, again in the two groups. To sum it all, we crossed a stream; nullah actually, tried to climb up a hill, succeeded partially, got surrounded by a pack of mean-looking dogs and came down. I also walked the length of the mall a couple of times for no particular reason but to just figure out why so many people come to Manali. And yes, I do have an answer but I am not going to tell you right away. Maybe, some other time. Well, to just end the story let me tell you that we took the same HPTDC bus, but with a better driver and conseqently better sleep for most of us and reached Delhi safely.
THE END Yes, that is the end.
For photos of the trip, go to my Solang Album Home page for travelogues