A magical day in the Himalaya

As you can tell from our recent posts we've been having a number of trying travel days. I'd been hoping for a 'magical India day' to happen. Travel here (for people from the West, at least) is often either really amazing, or really frustrating, and not all that much in-between.

We thankfully had a day of the amazing variety yesterday at 13,000 ft via a taxi ride up to the top of the Rohtang Pass.

The day before our adventure I had spoken with Alicia about chartering a taxi to go up to the pass (which I had been over in 2000 on my way to the Spiti Valley). That idea was bantered around with a few others but we did not make any specific plans. On our way to dinner that same day we ran into the wonderful Daniel and Alenka who we rode on the toy train to Shimla with (and who also stayed at Hotel Mold (aka the Woodland). They were staying in Old Manali and were passing through Vashisht on their way back from a hike. After some converstation we found out about their plans and we were graciously invited along.

We met up in Manali at 8:00am and started up the pass. I'll leave for Alicia to describe the ride up (the words nausea and roller-coaster come to mind). Once at the top you come to a bizarre temporary village of rock-and-tarp covered huts on the outskirts with wood-and-tarp stalls selling chai, food, and renting out snow suits. There is trash everywhere. There are also hordes of young men trying to sell us 'saffron' (for .25 a gram of course - it has to be real!) and 'amber'. These guys won't take no for an answer. Nothing like high pressure sales at high altitude.



A temple about 3/4 of the way to the top.

Snow suits? Well we were at 13,000 feet, and its not exactly warm. But for the hordes of domestic Indian tourists who come up here it must be very cold. That and most of the domestic tourists take a short horse ride up to the 'snow line' (though it seemed they were a good 500 feet short of it at the end of their ride). I'm assuming that there was a un-seen to us pile of snow for the car loads of 20-ish Indian men (who we often spied buying bottles of whiskey at "English Beer Stores" on the way up). For the two hours we were at the top we heard endless shouting and whooping from people who may very well were having their first snowball fight!

We quickly left the bizarre bazar where the taxi parked. We were all moving very slowly due to the altitude and continued harassment by the saffron sellers and made our way towards a number of impromptu Tibetan stupas on the ridge above.



Alicia and I with Tibetan prayer flags and the Himalaya behind us.

We continued past the stupas to the edge of the ridge where we could see down into the Lahaul Valley below. The scenery is stark and massive beyond what you can comprehend. Keep in mind that from where the picture below was taken (~ 13,300 ft) all the mountains go UP. Really high, from 17,000 ft up to around 20,000. The ridges fall away steeply into snow lined valleys.



The view at the top of our hike.



Alenka, Daniel, and myself with the massive mountains. Note the wind bending my hat rim over.



A happy Alicia!!

After two hours of walking around and being given the 'hard saffron sell' at 4000 meters we headed back to meet our driver for the hectic and headache producing ride down.

More photos:



A chai stop on the way up.



Alicia striking a pose in the middle of nowhere.



The stark surrounds...



More flags and the mountains behind.