Well we’re a little behind on the blog now. Last time we wrote we were about to leave Manali for a 2 day bus journey to get to a village called Leh in the middle of the Himalayas. And what a bus journey that was involving a broken down bus, 2 landslides, a lot of altitude sickness and an extra day on the bus, It’s taken us this long to recover!
We left Manali on the Monday at 11am and were due to arrive in Keylong where we were camping for the night around 7pm. The roads – if you can even call them that – were very bumpy, windy dirt tracks; the bus ride was described in the Lonely Planet as a bone shaker! We made it three quarter’s of the way to Keylong and were stopped by a landslide, a rock the size of a small house was blocking the road. We had to sit by the side of the road for about 2/3hrs while men drilled into the rock and then eventually had to blow it with dynamite! Once they had cleared the road were we off again, only to have to pull into a bus garage on the way to try and get the gearbox of the bus fixed. We eventually made it to the stop-over about 9pm ready for our beds. Yes we did actually get army style beds in the tents. We were due to leave the next morning at 5am to arrive in Leh that evening. However in order to get the bus fixed it needed a new part, and guess what, the part was in Manali and had to be driven overnight all the way to us from the place we had just set off from that morning! Then of course there was another landslide in exactly the same place as were got stuck the day before so the car with the bus part got stuck too! The part eventually arrived on Tuesday morning and we were on our way about 11.30am after a lovely breakfast of jam sandwiches, hmm. We were never going to reach Leh that night so we had yet another stop-over in a place called Pang – basically a bunch of tents in the middle of nowhere at about 5000m above sea level. Everyone on the bus was suffering some sort of altitude sickness from headaches to vomiting and then we found out our sleeping quarters for the night was a tent with a giant bed in it to sleep 6 people, oh the joy of joys! There wasn’t much sleeping done (apart from Nick who was the only person comatose the entire night). At 6am we were on our way again. It was definitely the most terrifying bus journey I have ever done. The scenery was spectacular and we passed the second highest motorable pass in the world, but the roads were on cliff edges with a drop of about 2000m to one side and nothing stopping you from going over. They were also single track with two way traffic, mainly trucks coming in the opposite direction. I definitely saw my life flash before my eyes when the bus driver decided to reverse back along the road to let a truck past and the wheels were about a foot from the edge, bloody scary! A bit of blues brothers on the ipod calmed me down after that.
After three days on the bus we did eventually make it to Leh in one piece and spent our first day trying to plan our escape route without getting back on a bus. Luckily we eventually managed to get a flight (phew!) although it meant staying in Leh for longer than originally planned. Anything not to get back on that bus! Since then we’ve been pretty much taking it easy and doing a bit of sightseeing of the local monasteries while acclimatizing to the height here and saving money for the three day trek we booked.
Caroline
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