Himalayas oh!!

This june me and Adi had been to Ladakh. Trained from birth not to make expensive trips, we chose to travel by road-train and bus. We went to Srinagar from delhi, stayed there overnight, traveled to kargil where we stayed for 2 days and set-off to leh. Srinagar is definitely a beautiful place but it was just 3 days after a hartal had broken out (a common phenomenon in J&K). I was a bit scared to see all the military vehicles patrolling the city with armed men! In south india it’s hard to see a military man on the road. Stay at kargil and view of tiger hills was really inspiring. I hummed “hey mere vatan ke logon”..The route from kargil to leh is awesome. The hills look different every 5 kilometers. You see snow capped peaks and suddenly barren land.

I just laughed at someone who said leh stands for “last end of Himalayas” but soon realized it was indeed true. We bought a map of leh and said to ourselves “yes we did it”!!..We had touched the Pakistani and Chinese borders…..

We stayed in leh for about 6 days, the first 2 days being the acclimatization period (which was obviously not sufficient). The pather sahib gurudwara, hunder sand dunes, hemis gompa , pangong tso lake are some places we visited!. Not to forget the “passes” we crossed..khardungla pass is the highest motorable road in the world and we were sitting in our ‘scorpio” proudly looking at the sign “you are at the highest road in the world”. I think it would take atleast 15 pages to describe all that we saw but we would run out words to describe the beauty of the place.

The days after the trip were much more memorable. We screened the photos to several group of students and every group said “ah” for each photo they saw. Every group wanted to visit leh the next summer.