29th June 2008 ~ Solang Nala - Marhi - Koksar - Sissu - Tandi - Keylong  


The sounds of everyone getting ready woke me up at 6 in the morning. As soon as I opened my eyes, the sight that I saw was of snow covered mountain peaks shining with the first rays of the sun. What a beautiful moment it was! Soon we settled our accounts and made payments we were ready to travel towards the day's destination.   As we started climbing... What  I saw after a while was this.... and soon we took a photography break... 

few macro flowers...

One click of pradeep on the way while a photography break...

And it called for a group photo...

We saw some awesome cloud formation in the morning, sights a shutterbug couldn’t resist and I got some really good photographs near Marhi.

Here everyone was busy clicking and I couldn't stop myself clicking this one... :)

View down from the same spot

Moving further we could see Marhi becoming a small dots...

We reached Rohtang pass around 9.30 am and clicked few photographs in the vicinity and sat down for breakfast of bread-butter, tea and Maggi. There were few stalls renting out things to fight cold... usual touristy stuff....

And one more click of saverjanik model....

After breakfast, everyone was ready to move on and on the way, we stopped for what had now become a ritual photography breaks.

We were so engrossed in photography that we didn't realise that lunch time passed. We had some munchies in the car, so helped ourselves to those. Around two we decided to take a break and enjoy river flowing nearby for a while before moving further.

There is a wonderful waterfall before Tandi.. one need to turn oneself just 60 degree to see the beauty... what a location it was...

We kept moving further river flowing with us....

We saw group of ladakhi women going home after work...

We reached Tandi around five pm, stopped at a petrol pump for a quick refill and also bought some extra fuel for emergency. Here we realized that one of rear tyres had a puncture but it had survived the drive so far only because they were tubeless tyres. This was the first time I saw how tubeless tyre punctures are fixed. I have handled the regular ones but this was my first experience with these. We took turns to fill air with the foot pump. I did my share till I got tired. Pradeep's contribution being the biggest. With everything in shape we drove towards Keylong.

We reached Keylong before dark and checked into Hotel Valley View and got our stuff unloaded and moved to our rooms. Once we had some tea and freshened up it was almost dinner time. For some reason unknown to us and known to them only there wasn't much light in the restaurant so we decided on having candle light dinner adding to the ambience of the place. I kept thinking that all of us had gelled so well with each other I just didn't feel that I had met them just a day before. After dinner we took a walk in the town where almost everything was closed for the day. Only one or two shops were open in the whole market. We headed back to our rooms and as usual I busied myself with the routine of downloading cards and gearing myself for the next day before sleeping. As with most nights, by the time I got to bed, it was midnight. The day had passed quite nicely with nothing major happening other than episode of the flat tyre.