The day the real climb starts. Till now we were in the mountains where even a school kid can ride on his bike and come. Today was the day when the real toughie climbs start. Tough not cos of the height but cos of the conditions of the roads.

We were told by Anu, the motorbike workshop guy, to get out early to avoid any traffic. He said it will be the best if we can get out at 4, but the problem was the only petrol pump on the way opens only at 5am. So thats what we did, woke up at 4 and got out of the hotel at exactly 5am. This is how the sky looked like that early in the morning

©Shyam

Even in that dark the drive was quite good, cos there was almost no traffic, and we were driving on a nice speed. The road till marhi was quite ok, except for some bad patches the road was still quite smooth. You do see things like this

but still this was one off incident, last year i had seen much worse roads on this strech. So i was quite happy that the roads were in such a good state. We reached Marhi, our first stop for breakfast, at arnd 6:30am. Not bad considering we covered some 35 kms in the one hour.

We had aaloo paranthas and tea. And we then took are first dose of Diamox. Its a precautionary dose that i would suggest that you take if you plan to do this trip, even if you think you are quite strong and nothing will happen to you:P. This half tablet help you a lot in getting acclimatise to the high altitude.

And then we were off again, as soon as we finished our breakfast, as we didnt want to get stuck in the traffic at all. But that wont make the roads cleaner, right ?. As this is where we faced the first real bad roads of the trip. almost 14kms of roads like this

From Ladakh 2009 - Day 4 - Manali To Keylong

I dont know why cant this road be fixed, and why i'm saying this is cos i've seen Baralachala, which is much higher than Rohtang.
But we did it, slowly and easy does it best is the rule on these roads. It took us more time to reach rohtang from marhi, than it took us to reach marhi from manali !

But we did reach Rohtang, finally arnd 8:30am. And this was the first thing shyam did after getting off his car, looked for any damage !

With all things in good shapes, we were all relived and it was time for some photos. you can see how happy we were in this photo :)

This is where we had our first hiccup. After having another cup of tea at Rohtang top, Salils bike, refused to start. After abt 10 mins of kicking and pushing his bike, it suddenly started. It seemed all fine at that time and we were off again, thinking that it was a small problem.

As you can see from the photos, Rohtang was quite cloudy. And just abt 2-3 kms from rohtang top, the sky was all clear ! which again gave us another opportunity to click some more nice photos, but we also didnt knew what was in store for us later on :). So we stopped there, took out our cameras and started clicking all around.

shyam even went up the hill !

The view was quite gorgeous there

Sallu loves getting his photos clicked

theres my beautiful bike :)

And then the real problem stuck, Sallus bike just refused to start at all ! we tried kicking/pushing it for abt half an hour and then we gave up. Stuck at rohtang top we couldnt do much. A biker couple who were coming from keylong even tried to help us, and that is where we found out that the Battery of Sallus bike was dead !. So we did what was best in that situation, stopped a mini truck and loaded Sallus bike and Sallu in it. The mini was going till kokhsar, 19kms from where we were standing. Something is good than nothing , right

Trying to load the bike on the truck

heres poor sallu, riding in the truck with his dear bike

On reaching khoksar, we were searching for our next ride which will take sallus bike to keylong where we were going to find a bullet mechanic. The mini-truck driver suggested us that we should tow/pull the bike all the way to keylong, and as it would be really hard to tow it using the swift, i tried pulling it. I cant explain how hard was it was, but i did tried. And in that i failed miserably. After towing for abt 100m, i slipped myself cos of the sudden jerk that comes when you tow something! Thankfully it wasnt a big fall, nothing serious happened.

And then we were told by a local that there is an army camp down the road and we can find some help there. They say Army is the lifeline of the mountains, and that is what we found out. Those helpful guys somehow arranged the cables and helped us "jump start" sallus bike.

Thanks a lot Sirs !

Once the bike started, the mechanic Halawadar Naik, told us to take the cable along. We were so happy that the bike started , that after saying a lot of thank yous we FORGOT to take the cable ! and we realised that when sallu's bike stopped again after some 10kms. I actually was driving at the front, so i didnt realise this until i noticed that noone was coming behind me. i went back and saw this scene

Shyam busy tweeting abt another breakdown

And since we had so conveniently forgot the cables back at the army camp, we couldnt do anything. So i went ahead again in search of some cables, going back was not an option as we had alredy covered some 10-15kms. Sallu and shyam waited there while i was gone. I did found the cables some 6-7kms later, but by the time i came back a Qualis driver was already working on the bike. Thanks to him we were again on the road. We only wasted an hour or so at that turn because of our own foolishness :)

And thankfully for the rest of the journey nothing happened. Sallu was told not to stop anywere before keylong. We were supposed to take petrol at Tandi, but even that was skipped!

So sallu went off at a good pace. Me and shyam came at our on pace. We finally reached manali at around 4, some 11 hours after we started !! We were so tired that we stopped at the first hotel we saw, it wasnt that nice. but we were too tired to look arnd. We dumped our stuff in the room. and while shyam and i took our showers and ate lunch, Sallu went looking for a mechanic to get his bullet fixed. Till then we had no clue about our next day, but thanks to a brilliant bullet mechanic sallus bullet was finally ready for the trip by 10pm !.

But, just think about it 115 kms in 11 hours ! one of the longest journey in a day for me :)