Ladakh Trip: Day 5 (Ambala City->Manali)

Ride Summary: Distance 400 km    Time: 11 hrs

We started from Ambala around 6 am. Shweta had joined me; so we had to mount her bag on the bike as well. The bike now had around 60 pounds of luggage. Approx. 15 pounds in each of the 4 bags. I really enjoy watching motorcycles fully loaded. They look like a star-studded bride to me. Anyways, enough :)


I was looking to take a nice pic of Shweta and I together but didn't really find any body. While we were riding towards Himachal, I just thought of the sun taking our picture :)

We reached Chandigarh around 7 am. What a beautiful city! So many trees! I had heard that Chandigarh is very good with traffic. I wanted to see how many people run red lights at 7:15 am. And there were many :(

So, sorry Chandigarh, but you didn't impress me in that department. We stopped for breakfast around 8:30 or so. Punjab's road quality is a notch below Haryana's.

The roads got worse when we entered Himachal. What a pity! The natural beauty around you is stunning but you can't really enjoy the ride due to bad roads. The ghats were really good for riding otherwise; very nice, quick, altitude gains. We kept stopping for pictures along the way. The good thing was we didn't have any target of reaching Manali; since we knew that the heat won't be such an issue now. We were gaining altitude and even if the sun was hot, the temperatures were on the rider's side.

The road was bad until about 30 km before Mandi. From there on, it was beautiful. However, when we stopped at this spot for a "couple" pic, we learnt that the unfortunate incident of 25+ students who passed away, happened near Mandi. The water behind us in this pic, that's where 5 bodies were found this morning. Some project released water without intimating the tourists; that led to this mishap, I was told.

We had lunch at another Dhaba. Kept on riding. The ride between Mandi and Kullu is super-awesome. I loved the twisties. And the improved road quality made it very enjoyable. The beautiful natural beauty around us meant more pictures. And more of them. We stopped at this joint where people were doing river crossing and stuff. That's when I came across another jugaad to keep the drinks cool :)

 We reached Manali around 5 pm. This was the 1st time we met with our fellow-riders for the remainder of the trip. They were making a ride to Manali via Lake Parashar. We were at a corner where I saw a massage guy walk past me. I stopped him and called him to my hotel room straight away!!! A full body massage with my back being rebuilt. He assembled it once again; That's the feeling I got :) I so enjoyed that one. Looking at me, everyone kinda followed and joined the massage club :) We had a rest day planned tomorrow. So everyone was in a relax'ed mood and we just hung out in the lobby till 1 am or so.