Leh: Back

Surprise, surprise - we made it. Safe, grinning, and rather impressed with ourselves.

And we did manage it a lot better than I would have expected. 0 casualties, 1 injury, 1 puncture, 2 damaged clutch plate sets, 1 cut clutch wire. All seven of us doing fine. All bikes in riding condition. Yeah, looks like we were really safe drivers.




With zero out-of-the-city biking experience, it does take some nerve and a bit of audacity to take on this route. And the reward is a whale of a time. The drive alternates between exhilerating, dangerous and tricky, as fast as the scenery changes between green slopes of grass or pine, cold desertlands and barren mountains in wild dashes of colour.
One avid biker (well, he just became one) in our group, Sriram, has finally started blogging all the nitty-gritties. Hope he manages to finish it too.

So there. Riding a ~200kg cruiser for ~2500kms, about a thousand of that in the Himalayan roads, is fun, back-breaking and perfectly doable. Nothing audacious about it, really. Trust me, I know.

Photos from this trip: by Shanthi and Jomy, and by Roop (my camera conked early on)

Leh: Flag off

It all starts tomorrow. The road trip. The third best, say some, but possibly the best we might get to do.

We're catching a flight on Saturday to Delhi, renting some Enfield Thunderbirds there, and biking off to Leh. Going a clockwise round trip of Delhi-Srinagar-Kargil-Leh-Manali-Delhi, about 2500kms in all, and will also be paying an exclusive visit to Khardung La, north of Leh, arguably the world's highest motorable road.

Abhi is just back from a biketrip to Leh, and between the five of them on seven bikes over 14 days, they had 15 gigs of photos, 1 puncture, 1 burnt sprocket, 1 damaged suspension, 1 hairline fracture and about 15 minor injuries.

Unlike Abhi's gang, we seven are a somewhat odd lot, without much biking experience (does trekking experience count?) With a who's who of riders looking like this:

The number of riders

who have fixed bikes before: 1
who ride a bike regularly: 5
who have ridden bikes regularly: 6
who have ridden an Enfiled for >10km: 0
who have biked on long trips: 2
our plan does look rather audacious, don't you think?

Wish us luck. We'll need it.

Plan B; B for Beach

Thanks, that was very gracious of you (see previous post). I'm about a month late in blogging this trip of ours to anticlimactic forests and cute lovely beaches. The delay can well be attributed to any of starting trouble, writer's block, holiday hangover or work pressure, but let me play the honest guy and admit I was lazy.


Oct 13, 2005: We had only called up Dandeli Forest Dept. the day before, and couldn't book tents in the Kulgi Nature Camp - we were just asked to come to the camp, where two tents were expected to be vacant.But, lo, you guessed right, they were not. We were politely shown the door, or gate, whatever (intriguingly, there's a cut-out of a bison by this gate) ("Rooms, no. Only dormitory."). We anyway didn't fancy the idea of staying in a "nature camp" just 1km from civilization, from where there was a rain-induced moratorium on treks ("No permit") and the watchmen very skeptical of jungle safaris ("If you're lucky, you can see.."). We also considered Jungle Lodges, but they were really expensive, and they seemed to prefer hikes (though they called them treks) to treks anyway. We rang up a trek organizer, one Manjunath Rathode (our eventual trip-nemesis) who wasn't available, went back to Dandeli, and checked in at State Lodge, just opposite the bus stand, with whom we got a safari arranged for the evening.