Day -5: The return leg starts.
Route: Kaza – Tabo – Nako – Jhakdi (just before Rampur).
I could not sleep properly the whole night. Some sort of restlessness kept me wide awake for the most part. I even tried to shoot some stars, but the lack of any kind of light made it almost impossible to do so (it was after all a moonless night). DCS was sleeping, while I was dreaming about the wonderful ride that I had. This was not the kind of ride that could be done each month, at a leisure pace. This is something that requires a fair bit of planning, and ofcourse quite a lot of time in hand.
I don’t know when I felt asleep to these thoughts, but when I woke up early in the morning, the sun was just starting to rise and the hills were glowing brown and gold with the sunlight. I took out the camera and shot some pictures of the same.
Early Morning at Kaza.
Godly Reflection.
Kaza town at 0530 hours.
The early morning sun-rays casting a golden hue on the hills near-by.
After waking up, and freshening up and lubing the drive-chains of our respective machines, we started from Kaza towards Delhi. It was a very chilly morning and the wind was really getting to us. Enroute, we stopped again at Lingti village to have a hot cup of tea each, which really helped us warm a little.
A wild plan which did strike our crazy minds was that we should try and hit Delhi by continously riding towards Delhi. We calculated. It would take us 24 hours of continous riding to get to Delhi from Kaza. We wanted to do it, but then again not everyone is a Lovemax or Yogesh Sarkar. As much as we wanted to do it, the weather somehow played spoil-sport. We reached Bhaba Nagar, which acted as our destination for the first night, at about 4pm. The weather was getting really bad. It started to drizzle. We rode on. We wanted to reach Rampur before calling it a day. But, we had barely crossed Bhaba Nagar when it started to rain furiously. We took shelter under the huge rocks which grace the roads of the whole of Kinnaur valley. After the rain let off a little, we started our enroute journey.
We were really cold, and hungry and a little tired of all that was ensuing – the weather, the road conditions, and ofcourse the chill. We reached a place called Jhakdi, about 10kms. from Rampur. We searched for a nice, cheap cozy room there, and called it a day. Delhi was still 500+ kms. away. The weather was looking bleak, but atleast the Vodafone network had started to follow us from Jhakdi! I would like to mention here that if you use a Vodafone network, you are in for some real trouble. Use only Airtel, Aircel or BSNL if you plan to visit such remote places like Spiti or even Kinnaur. Vodafone will NOT follow you wherever you go. That’s the BIGGEST misleading advertisement one can ever find.
Because of the bad weather, we did not click any pictures of the ride back. Hence, you would only see text and not many pictures.
Next
Day 6: We dash back to Delhi, enroute meeting with a few Chandigarh xBhpians, and getting stopped by three young and healthy boys on a Hyundai Accent, on NH-1!
...in search of that perfect world. 