Chasing Snow

Have you ever played with ice when your amma used to defrost the fridge at
home in your school days? Well, having done that this summer I decided to
upgrade my snow experience by going to the Himalayas and see real snow
for real. So this is about how to trick your parents and to go see snow

The first step in the process is to somehow convince your parents to spend
their money on you is to make them believe that this is a life changing career
building opportunity, so I convinced my parents that Im taking up a
internship in Delhi for two weeks and would be going to Himachal for a week.
Now having sanctioned money and permission to go , the next step was to
plan it .We(Sid and me) booked our train tickets on the Rajdhani, because
this would take us to Delhi through the Konkan route, which is riddled with
tunnels, sea on one side and the western Ghats on the other. On reaching
Delhi we stayed at a tourist hostel dormitory in south extension, neraby the
INA metro station. Then it was two weeks of Delhi-Juma Masjid, Old Delhi
food joints and planning for the trip. The second step was to book tickets to
go to Manali form Delhi and back, so we went to the ISBT to book our tickets
on the HPSRTC buses, it cost us around Rs.1500 to Manali, Rs.700 from
Manali to Shimla and another Rs.700 from Shimla back to Delhi. The next
step was living out the internship period of two weeks, well that went pretty
slow but in the end it got over. We booked a budget hotel in Manali which
cost around Rs.1200 per day. So on 20 th morning we took bus the bus from
Delhi to Manali , it was a fifteen hour trip passing through Karnal,Chandigarh,
Ambala and Bilaspur.We passed through the large fields of Punjab and
Haryana, crossing huge canals of the Bakra Nangal dam project to reach
bilaspur, the district which borders Punjab and Himachal. From there we
started the climb to reach Manali, the bus climbed around 200 odd
kilometers to reach Manali.

Next day we booked our tickets to Rohtang pass Manali, that cost around
800 per head. The bus was scheduled for next day morning. We decided to
spend the day by visiting the hot springs in Vashisht so we walked all the
way to the temple. We took a shortcut riddled with apple trees on both sides.
The temple area was filled with shops selling woolen caps,carftworks,and the
usual stuff you find in a tourist place apart from that there was this huge
Angora rabbits which you could take pictures with for Rs10. Nearby to this
we found a German bakery which had all sorts of possible(from pie to
chocolate ) food and the most interesting part was the bench outside the
bakery filled with hippies, hippies as In all sorts of hippies-sketching things in
their sketchbooks ,doing crochet works with all the Rastafarian colors and as
usual wearing dreadlocks ,rolling ,smoking up and talking philosophy. Next
we trekked through the hills to a waterfall nearby called Jogini falls, the area
near the falls was filled with pine trees and we could see the snow capped
mountains in the vicinity ,the place was filled with hippies meditating on the
nearby mountain tops, It was almost night fall by the time we reached back
to our room.

Next day we got up early to go Rohtang pass, we took the bus around 7:30
AM from Manali to Rohtang and started moving along NH 21 with Beas river
on one side .As the journey progressed, I was rather impressed with driving
skills of the driver. First we took a stop at a shop to rent out cloths. What I
observed that cloths arent for the cold but for shielding from being wet from
dead cold snow. Plastic boots and normal waterproof sort of jackets cutout in
unique way, in which lowers and top both been joined together and one had
to move into it and then pull up the zip(looked like a fighter jet pilot). We
received traffic on the way, majority of those seem to be those trucks, oil
tankers, bikers heading towards Leh-Ladakh and cabs going to Rohtang. We
reached at Rohtang Pass by 3 PM covering distance of 52km with an
elevation of 6500ft was done within 8 hrs due to heavy traffic, we had to stop
by some 15-20 minutes at Rani Nallah (8-9 km far from the Rohtang pass
,the roads were maintained by border roads organization and was in pretty
good condition).

Snow wasnt all white as we might have pictured in our mind nor spread all
over like it happens to be in May or August, but land spots were looking out
from snow layers. Tourist footprints had made snow dirty a little and even
after those boots, keeping the feet on ground was chilling. Now it was the
last and final step SNOW, we did everything possible on it ,by the time we
got down all my toes turned pale blue and went inside the bus to warm
them. We got down again to drink coffee and smoke a cigarette sadly we
didnt carry any whiskey with us other than that my first experience with
snow was really something.

We returned back to Manali and visited a few place around Manali .Next day
we took a bus to Shimla and a day later back to Delhi .Thats how I chased
down snow all the way from Kerala.