#1 Journey to the Top- Leh Ladakh

This will be series of articles on my recent journey to one of the world's highest hill station Leh and its neighboring places.

Manali to Leh

It's 3am in the morning, chilling winds everywhere, temperature is about 2-3 degree Celsius but for us seems like we're about freeze. The roads were deserted and the stray dogs ruled the streets at this time. My friend suggested me to search for some place to spend another 5hrs but hardluck no one answered our calls. This was our first impression of India's most remote hill station which is 430kms from Srinagar, Kashmir and 460kms from Manali, Himachal Pradesh. Wait I haven't told you how we (me and my friend) got in such a situation. Let's roll 36hrs back.

Trying to save some money and planning to reach Leh without much hassle, we decided to board the ordinary HRTC (Himachal Road Transport Corporation) bus. This was the only bus that traveled directly from Delhi to Leh. So having keen faith in our decision we hopped in our wagon at 2.30pm. The journey was going as planned till our bus broke down (some pressure pipe according to the driver) and we were stuck. This was a about 24hrs before we reached Leh. So the journey of mishaps had just started to bloom.

The bus was mended and finally we reached Manali at around 8am (19hrs to Leh). Since the bus was not quite comfortable considering the hilly roads we decided to get down at Manali.

The eye catching morning view(HRTC bus stand, Kullu , 40kms from Manali)

"Let's take a shared cab to Leh, we will reach there today itself and save a ton of time and hassles", the only faulty idea in the whole trip. A warning note to everyone going to Leh from Manali, never take a Tata Sumo shared cab from Manali to Leh if you love your ass and don't want hip related problems.

So,we began our journey for the next 15hrs(which we were initiall informed to be about 12hrs) to the highest Indian hill station and the cold desert.

Sarchu, JK

It's me on the left.

To be continued in the next post...