A 532 km Himalayan Road journey to Manali, Himachal Pradesh

After being muted on worldmappin for a long time, today I am sharing my first post with you. I was the reason for my muting, I reposted old posts due to which I was permanently muted by the @worldmappin team. I am deeply grateful to @azircon who recommended @detlev to unmute me which was happily accepted. I have promised myself and the hive community that I will not repeat the mistakes made in the past.

There is a road race starting from Solang Valley to Leh which is called 'hell ultra 480', in this race the runner has to run 480km in 120 hours. There are other categories in this event in which the runners have to do 5 marathons in 5 days and in another category one has to run 80km. This event is organized between Manali and Leh in June every year and I have been volunteering in this running event for many years. This year too I got this golden opportunity, so without any hesitation I prepared my bag for this new adventure.

I come to Delhi by bus from Dehradun on 13th June where I stay for 2-3 days and meet my team. 3 cars are going with us, the rest we will rent from Manali. One of our companions leaves late while we take the car at 7 am, load all the luggage and head towards Manali. The journey will start from Gurugram and go till Manali and in this we will cover a distance of 532 km by road.

We cross Delhi from Gurugram, the advantage of starting early in the morning is that there is no traffic jam. We cross Colonel GT Highway and have breakfast, for breakfast we eat Aloo Ka Paratha with tea. After breakfast at 10:30, our next target is Rupnagar where we will have lunch. The road is empty and we are driving keeping in mind the speed limit on the road, I am a little surprised that it would have been better if the speed limit here was 80 instead of 60.

Ever since the 4 lanes have been made from Swarghat to Manali, reaching Manali has become very easy and convenient. Although the tunnel of Hanogi temple has not been opened yet, but when that only remaining tunnel will be opened, then reaching Manali will become really easy. We have lunch after reaching Sundar Nagar which was quite ahead of our fixed location. We reach here at 3 o'clock. We have dal, potato cumin vegetable and butter roti for lunch.

Before evening, we stop at Barista Cafe where we prepare ourselves for the remaining journey by drinking a hot cappuccino each. While the temperature in Delhi was 42 degrees, here in the car we have now turned off the AC as well, it is cold coming from outside and it feels very good when it touches the skin. We reach Kullu walking along the banks of the Beas river. The sun is about to set here, we stop for a while and straighten our backs. The journey is only 40 kms from here. It seems we will reach Manali in the next 2 hours.

By 6:30 in the evening we touch the border of Manali but get stuck in the traffic jam here and waste our entire 3 hours. Today we have to stay at Dashaur Hotel in Barua village where we have 2 rooms booked. We check in the hotel at 9:30 in the night and curse the traffic jam in Manali. The weather here is cold so I quickly change and wear warm clothes. We have dinner at 10 and after talking for 2 hours we go to sleep at 12 in the night.

Today on the way we saw the sunrise, saw empty roads and jam packed roads, came out of the city and saw the peace of the mountains, heard the flowing water of the Beas river, saw hot air balloons flying in Bhuntar, saw the sunset over Kullu, saw apple orchards and saw the confluence of Dhauladhar and Pir Panjal in the lap of Solang valley. I hope you will like these photos clicked from mobile...which have been edited with the mobile Lightroom app.

Disclaimer: This post is originally written in Hindi and I have used Google Translator to translate the Hindi text in English. All the photos have been clicked by me from POCO F1 smartphone and edited in mobile lightroom app, post thumbnail created in adobe photoshop.