Ladakh Trip - Day 5

Day 6

Ladakh Trip - Day 6

Ladakh - Day 3

Day 4 pics

Ladakh Trip - Day 4

(Actually i wasn't even ready with my stuff the day before :D. With lots of last minute shopping including Shoes, I somehow managed to get things packed and was almost ready to go. )

So i woke up at 3 got ready at 4:15 .. all packed .. and called T to find out where he was. At 5am we met outside the oberoi hotel in delhi. And our journey started at around 5:15 in the morning. The clouds were there, but were not that threatening. So we started with leh in our minds.

The morning ride was quite ok, not too good cos the road just arnd the delhi border was not in a very good condition (this was the impression on the very first day), but still ok we were excited enough that this didn’t mattered much and we took our first break at murthal. Some 56kms were covered in abt an hour. We stopped to have some tea, but didn’t eat any thing there.

The eating breakfast part came some 80 kms and 2 hours later (8:30am) at Zilmil Dhaba.. Now this is a place that you have to have Paranthas ! :) . It did drizzled arnd panipat which by the way is a great place to just cos of the new flyover they have, its just so easy to cross panipat now.

When we were not sure that it will actually rain so we never covered out bags, as you can see in this photo.

From Ladakh - Day1

(yes ! I was carrying that much of load , and yes a I need to learn to ride lighter ! :P, T was on his bajaj avenger, the bullet is mine. )

So as the clouds were getting darker we thought we cover the bags and then go ahead, but after 50% unpacking we thought well its not gonna rain so lets just ride and see what will happen.

And and and … it started raining arnd ambala.

Cont….

Disclaimer

P.S…. these are turning out to be pretty long posts .. so it will take time to finish !

We took many precautions, did loads of research, took many risks and had some bad days on the way too. But that was our choice, our risk, our life.

The trip is as risky as it can get. So be careful about what you decide about anything you do about going to leh.

Think ..

After my last unsuccessful try to reach leh on my Bullet (yeah its not just another “bike” .. it is an Enfield Bullet :P) I was pretty determined to do it someday. I tried and tried but nothing eventually happened for about 3 years

And then just like that one day sometime in april-may 2008, I was just chatting and bragging about my last trip on the bike, Tanmoy (a colleague had who just bought a brand new Bajaj Avenger) said that we should do that Leh trip.

And then it all began. As days went by we got serious about the trip. We actually made lots of plans on paper and collected loads of info, trying to make sure that the trip goes as smooth as possible. The first date we planned was 10th of Aug, but cos of Rakhi we moved the plans to 17th of Aug

Here are some of the trip plans/ preparation plans / maps we used for our reference.

Final trip Details : http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dd3xn8fx_17gmc7rfcr
Prepration details : http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dd3xn8fx_15fzphw3f5
Himachal Map : http://surindersingh.googlepages.com/MAPhim.jpg
Road Condition : http://surindersingh.googlepages.com/Manali-leh.gif (this turned out to be a nice help, but this also turned out to be pretty wrong at place)

But the best doc is this one The First Draft of the Trip

We planned everything, from where to stop , what time to stop, where to eat, where to sleep .. everything !

But .. nothing actually turned up according to that plan or any plan we made

15-16 long days on the Bullet .. actually came back on thursday night... but gave my dear body a good rest before i touch the comp again :)

Will write abt the trip in detail later on. This time i'll !! :).

Here a small photo to begin with ..
rest will come soon

From Did It !

dont know if this is good or bad ..

but right now i'll have to make a "Plan B" ... hmm