Leh 2010: A Trip of a Lifetime - 1

My previous post was on October 13, 2010. That makes this the longest break from blogging. Time to break the break! I will continue from where I left off...the trip to Leh. This is with apologies to Vaish, Aparna and Bikramjit who had enquired about my snaps. 

We set off from Delhi on a cool morning on 29th August. The relative strangers. One of them I had met once before and one I was meeting for the first time! Such bonding can only happen in the biking world. The first day was pretty much uneventful. Highway biking...getting to know oneself and the bike as well as each other. I was doing long distance after almost a decade.

One of the pleasures of highway driving is stopping at the Dhabas. One can't imagine highways in India without Dhabas. 

By afternoon we hit Chandigarh and headed up towards Manali. Here we ran into our first hiccup. BD - riding a Royal Enfield 350cc Electra ran out of fuel! And at this stage we had not yet started to carry extra fuel. So after siphoning from the other bikes we fuelled up enough to take him to the nearest petrol pump. We halted the first night at Mandi - having been unable to hit Manali due to the time lost re-fuelling. 

The next day we moved on towards Manali. Enroute we hit the most amazing apple orchards - in bloom. There were apples of all shapes, sizes and colours. 

I especially loved the  one with little green apples. Reminds of this song by Frank Albert Sinatra - Little Green Apples. 


It is really nice to see the apples on trees...

The road to Manali was really scenic. We stopped to look at the mist rising in the morning from the Beas river. A surreal sight. 

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