The Crazy Himalayan Ride
Continued from the previous page...
It was 3o’clock when I finally reached Rajgarh and though fatigue was starting to set in, there was still a long ride ahead of me. I made the mistake of not eating any thing at Rajgarh and didn’t purchase any water either. I was actually more interested in the ride ahead, as it seemed that every few turns, the vistas got better and better and I was enjoying that!
While I was expecting bad roads, I didn’t think that would actually get as good as roads in Suru Valley (or bad, depending on how you want to look at it).
This also meant that riding speed got dropped by a large margin and my stock of water also ran out! Now I was dehydrated and hungry and villages I was passing through didn’t even have a tea stall, let alone a restaurant.
Finally I stopped at a small village and asked the girl running the general store if she had packaged water or cold drinks, she didn’t have either, but offered me a glass of water which she fetched from home. After drinking it and thanking her, I purchased a pack of biscuit from her and started on my journey towards Nahan.
An hour or so later, I was again thirsty, just then I came across a hand pump in the middle of nowhere. Thanking god, I filled up my bottle, only to discover it was slightly orangish in color. Beggars can’t be choosers, so I drank almost a liter of that orangish water and ate the orange cream biscuits purchased from that girl’s general store.
Took this photo by placing the camera on the same handpump
Few kilometers down the road, I came across the small village of Bagthan. It had a small tea stall cum restaurant, where I got couple of chapattis with dal, onions and pickle for Rs. 12 (29 cents) and the owner also filled up my water bottle with the clean water he had. I also decided to pack my camera, since it was already getting dark and I wanted to cover as much distance as possible, during the day time.
After Bagthan, the roads improved quite a bit with a few rough patches in between. By 7:15pm, I was in Nahan, 265kms from Delhi. After filling up petrol here (Rs. 47+ a liter) I headed for Kala Amb.
After reaching Kala Amb, I saw a board pointing the direction to Ambala and headed off in that direction. The roads were in really bad shape. It was quite surprising; since Kala Amb is an industrial town and road to Ambala should be of significant importance. After covering 6-7 kms, I came across a village and stopped to ask a few people if I was on the correct route and it turned out, that the board at Kala Amb was pointed in the wrong direction and I actually made it to Trilokpur and had to backtrack to Kala Amb and take the different route!
I found this really ridiculous and annoying, I mean, how can government department point the board to the wrong route and not correct it even after all the people seem to know about it?
Any ways, I made it back to the Kala Amb and started towards Ambala on the single lane state highway which had quite a few bumpy stretches. However once I hit the NH-1, it was smooth sailing with a dinner stop near Kurukshetra.
After the heavy dinner I did start to feel sleepy and to make matters worse, the high beam of my motorcycle started malfunctioning and would sometime turn off on its own, forcing me to ride with the low beam on instead.
Due to this, I had to continuously stop to drink water and wash my face. But I managed to reach home safe and sound at 2 am, having covered 780kms in 22 hours and 30 minutes. Making this the most intensive day ride and second biggest distance covered in a day, by me.
Route Taken: Delhi – Karnal – Ambala – Panchkula (spent three hours there) – Kalka – Solan – Gaora – Yashwant Nagar – Rajgarh – Bagthan aka. Baru Sahib – Bonethi – Nahan – Kaalamb – Narayangarh – Shahzadpur – Ambala – Karnal – Delhi
Few more photographs