We woke up around 6 o’clock. It was Monday but we had no blues. Because, today we will go to Manali via Jalori pass. It was about 200 Kilometers drive, so we’d need the whole day.
The roads here are much simpler than what we have driven on for last few days, so progress was decent.
We reached a small but crowded town called Oni around 8 o’clock.
Breakfast was non-delicious alu paratha and some worse cabbage curry. The tea was better though. Post the tea, I came out of the shop and lit up while ladies settled the bills. The shopkeeper cum waiter came running down and hissed in my ear – “smoking here is fined at Rs. 500/-“. In a reflex I threw it off and stomped over.
You had to see the laughter among the guys. They simply took me for a ride! Although pissed, this piece of practical joke eased off my mind a great deal from the yesterday’s trauma.
With a smiling face I promised him that I would certainly break his leg if I ever spot him at any corner of Mumbai. And we left...
The scenery was beautiful. The greenery, the pine/ Christmas trees, the river, the streams were enchanting after three days of barren yellow at Nako.
The climb to Jalori is a plain broken dirt road. Something got into my front right wheel (some stone chips I guess) and kept making an irritating noise. I ignored it and moved on. We reached Jalori around 10 o’clock.
Jalori is like a poor man’s pass. One needs to be told that this is a pass. It was the first pass my sister had ever seen and she needed to be pacified with stories of snow covered passes coming up.
We loitered a little, made ample fun of the driving advisory board and pushed on.
About 30 minutes after leaving Jalori, we came across this beautiful dam. It also had a temple on the far side. The color of the water was amazingly green. (No snaps of the sluis as it said "no photograhy" in bold big letters.)
From there progress was quite fast, and we hit the Aut tunnel around 12 o’clock, and was in Kullu by 12:30. First glimps of the Beas was enchanting. We got down at one place and soaked in the view for a few minutes.
Initially plan was made to reach Manali by 1:30 – 2 o’clock, check in to a hotel, get some rest and explore Manali Van Vihar in the evening.
But soon we came across a number of boards pointing towards Manikaran. We haven’t been to Manikaran last time we were in Manali. So we decided to check it out, given that we had some time in our hands.
The first 30 Kilometers were peaceful, the last 2 kilometers was traffic jam.
We slogged hard dodging hordes of sheep and reached Manikaran around 3:30 Pm.
We parked at manikaran gurudwara. There is a wide clean path from Parking to Gurudwara which was taken by mom and sister. I followed my wife's newly acquired mountaineering skills to the same destination.
The bengalis passed a number of remarks, like -
"Ki Dada, tool debo?" (Should I give you a stool to step on?")
All Manikaran has got is some hippie looking foreigners and a hot spring completely monopolized by a Gurudwara and a Temple. How can the Governement allow private/ religious establishments to proprietorize a natural phenomena. I was mighty pissed with the wastage of time. This is all that is left for nature lovers at manikaran!
Without wasting much time around there, we returned back.
On our way out of the Gurudwara, I came across the most ungrateful pack of three young guys. They asked me to take a snap of them, which I did. I took there snaps standing, sitting down, tilting aside.
After I had finished, they took back their camera, checked the snaps and said - "We needed the water to be in the background"!
Then you should tell that FIRST!!
![Frustration](https://www.team-bhp.com/forum/images/smilies/Frustration.gif)
Whatever! We left.
Now we needed lunch. On the way up, we spotted many a dhabas and hotels on the way. I parked in front of a nice looking one. All got down and entered the hotel restaurant.
The owner greeted us with a warm smile and informed that food was not available as the cook was “busy”. What can keep a hotel cook busy at lunch time other than “cooking?”!
We went a little further and found another one. Cook was busy cooking there.
But it was an Israeli joint. Hippie ladies were wearing quite outrageous dresses inside. I didn’t mind, but I had my mom along. However, we decided to ignore and got seated anyway. Mom was told that they were having some fancy dress competetion!
The menu was like CAT question paper. You have to choose from what’s there, and plenty is there but you don’t have the slightest clue about what’s what!
My sister who otherwise claims herself to be an expert on outlandish food completely flopped. She asked if they served dal chawal?!
They didn’t and we had to choose stuff to eat from the CAT paper itself. So we asked the waiter to suggest, while maintaining an air that we are actually understanding what he was saying.
I mainly kept silent, I had my day with waiters already!
After much discussions and conversations, we ordered things like Pita, Lafa, Falafel, Bureka etc. Everything were cooked using wheat flour, that’s all I can tell for sure. They told those were veg stuff, but we wouldn’t know even if they had stashed dog meat in those.
We ate whatever we could, made a complete mess of there elaborate food dressing procedures and left. If there was a writer among the stoned hippies, she wouldn’t write highly about Indian food culture.
Post lunch, We reached Manali without much ordeal, and checked into a hotel near the mall.
The plan is to get up as early as possible and leave for Kaza.
So, we requested the hotel guys to give us a wake up call and tea around 6:30. And received the good news.
Rohtang pass was blocked on Tuesdays by GREF for road widening work. That’s what we needed. After such ordeal and set back, we were finally defeated.
Well, what could we do? It was not meant to happen. We won’t see Spiti.
We decide to take a day off and rest in Manali and go back. I wasn't even depressed!
Around 8 o’clock, I got out of the room and decided to take a stroll around the mall. Just for time pass, I entered a travel agents office and asked if he can rent out a cab for going to Kaza tomorrow. He quoted Rs. 5000/- for dropping off us to Kaza and said we would have to leave at 5 o’clock as road will be closed later.
I didn’t even thank him and came running back to hotel. We sort of beat ourselves to sleep.