on my way: manali

What a drive!!!
The bus to Leh was supposed to start at morning 6 o’clock. The bus driver arrived about 6:30. I have the seat next to the driver. It is promising to have the best view. After picking the other 10 people we start until we reach the big landslide which came down about half hour earlier. In the following hours men come to sell saffron, corn and other food. They offer paragliding. It starts raining. Other people who got stacked in the big jam come and ask for picture with the “red¬-noses”. All the people in the bus start chatting to each other and we have lots of fun. The cars in the jam turn around and go back to Manali. In the end it has only busses and trucks there. Our driver still believes that we can reach Leh on our second day. After about 8 hours the road opens for a while and we continue on the extremely muddy wet road. Just next to the road it goes hundreds meter steep downhill. Sometimes the bus is sliding but we have a real good driver and he can manage to bring us up to the hill. “Thanks Destas that you brought us through this safely!” When it is dark we find somewhere a guesthouse and stay overnight. The birthday of Natalie is celebrated with rice pudding and halash.

Next day starts at 6:30 with promising nice weather. But the luck is not on our side. After view hours and just a few bends before the Rothang-pass one of our brake tubes starts leaking. The driver tries his best to repair it with a condom!!!!  It doesn’t work. Later a friendly bus driver stops, gives us some tools and helps our driver to repair. This time they use patty, tape and a toothpick. It seems to work and we continue as the driver says: “slowly slowly go”. Our feeling is not very well but what else should we do? Later we find a small tent-village with a car repair shop. We go for lunch and the car goes for repair. After one hour we continue with a happy driver. Several hours later we go down from a pass and ask for a stop for picture. Pure luck! When we go off the car we find the hose leaking again more seriously than before. Next to us the mountain goes down for a few hundred meter. William starts showing symptoms of height sickness. Besides it really starts getting cold. We worry that we have to stay overnight because it is already an hour before sunset. The driver repairs the car again in about an hour. We decide that we can’t drive to Leh at night with sick people and a sick bus. At another tent-village we sleep. The car gets repaired and the driver does several test drives. We all fit into a tent. Most of us have sleeping bags, others get blankets. The stony ground and the attitude of 4200 meter keeps most of us awake. I have like usual a good sleep.

In the morning at 4:30 we get up. Two of our group have serious symptoms of height sickness. They vomit, can barely get up, have bad headache... We need to decent as quick as possible! Hope the car will do it to Leh this time. But before this we have to go over two more passes. One is the world’s second highest pass Taglangla with 5328 m. It is cold there and the high attitude doesn’t help on the blood circulation. A last vomiting of our patients and then we continue to decent. After about 2 hours we reach 4100 m and a teahouse. We stop and order lunch. After a while also our two patients awake and feel better. William evens speaks already hinglish to us. What a release!
I did not describe the environment we drove through. It is so amazing that you better just watch the pictures...