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Ladakh 2009 – Day 3 – In Manali

August 20, 2009: Well this was the rest + get your stuff fixed day. Nothing much happened. Woke up late cos of the heavy fluid intake the night before.

And this is how the room looked in the morning ©Shyam

So agenda for the day was to get bike+car fixed as Shyam was thinking that he will go ahead with us till Keylong and then decide what to do. With not too much to be done we had a leisurely breakfast and some more photos taken in the morning.

After the breakfast we moved out for get two things done, our bikes serviced and find out how to tow shyams car in case of an emergency. We actually tried the night before to get that "fixed" in his car, cos according to us there was no was to tow that car !

We first went to the bike workshop. This workshop in manali is one of the best, Anu Motor works. I say this cos for the last 2 times i've been going to this same workshop and got some excellent work done. The owner organizes ladakh trip and he is quite famous with the foreigners there. And i've never met him. When we reached the workshop the workers were quite busy with other bikes and they told us to come after 2pm.

So we moved to manali market then to spend the next few hours. Bought jerry cans for petrol, got a duplicate key made for sallus bike, bought new gloves for 600 each (supposedly they were better than the older ones !) and ate somethings at a German dhaba, where nothing was german ! and just roamed around the market doing some "window shopping"

And by 2 we were back at the workshop, where on the way we saw the workers going towards a hotel and they told us that they will be back in 15 mins. So at the workshop we were waiting for them and we saw another guy. We asked that guy when should we expect the workers to come back, and he told they should be back soon. Then he asked us, " agar aapko problem na ho to main aapki bike par kam kar loon" and we said " agar aapko humse zyada pata hai, to zaroor kar lo". And then when he started working on sallus bike, i asked him " Anu abhi bhi trip par hai kya ?" and then that guy said " main hi Anu hoon ! "

and we were like :O , hello ! That simple, thin guy working on our bike is the Owner of the workshop ! and he asked for our permission to work on our bikes !!

He turned out to be an excellent person. Heres a photo of him with sallu

In the next hour or so our bikes were ready. Anu told us that if we have to cross rohtang, we should start early, very early , 5am to be precise. As 5am is when the petrol pump on the way to Rohtang opens :). Anu also told us the location of maruti service station.

So shyam went back to the hotel, got his car, and we were off to the service center to get his car cleaned/serviced. We also wanted to get our problem solved, we couldnt find the hook which is used in case his car needed to be towed. All of us tried to find it, but couldnt. And we reached the service center where the mechanic told us where is the hook, which turned out to be pretty silly of us to not notice that. In case you also have a swift and are now wondering where it is, then look at this image

http://www.motorbeam.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/modified_maruti_swift.jpg

and see that angled rectangular box above the left fog light. Thats it, that comes out and your tow hook goes inside !

With all things done, it was just 4-5pm, and we did the best thing possible then. Went back to the hotel, went to the restaurant at the upper floor of the restuarant and did nothing much after that, just drank some more fluids and ate lots of junk. The restaurant of the hotel is like that, you can just sit down order a drink and spend your time watching movies on the big screen.

And thats how we ended the day, waiting for the real trip to start tomm, when we were going to conquer the first big pass, Rotang La !

There are not many pics of that day cos i have already clicked a lot of manali pics on my last trip, so i added those 2008 pics too in the album here.