Tagne 2001

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Dan's Diary

Day 3 - Saturday 30th June 2001

Guarding the expedition luggage at New Delhi station

I was up at 5:15am having overslept my 5am alarm. I finished packing and managed to get both my plastic boots and my down jacket in my rucksack. How come I had so much room in my rucksack I thought, which only made me worry that I'd forgotten something. We took our rucksacks out to the front of the building at 6am and started loading the waiting taxi with our luggage. Rahul turned up in a rickshaw and we all got in the taxi and left for the railway station. Elephants were out on the road carrying passengers and monkeys were seen running about on the pavement, eating the scraps from the gutter.

We arrived at the railway station to a constant honking of horns. The station was set in a poorer suburb of Delhi. Shacks lined the streets, stacked on top of each other like Lego blocks. People were living on the pavement in amongst the litter. We pulled into a parking space, and as we got out, half a dozen porters had arrived from nowhere seeing that there was good money to be had. After a lot of waving of hands and a long discussion, a porter brought a wooden cart on which they loaded all of our luggage. It took four or five of the porters to push this cart and they had to take a run up to get it up the ramp in to the station, almost taking out those people that got in the way.

We waited on the platform for our train. I soon got annoyed by the women on the Tannoy system who every ten seconds would play an irritating jingle and then say what she had to. What I could have done with a shotgun. It was just too much noise for that early in the morning.

The train arrived at 7:10am. We went and found our seats while Rahul went with the luggage to make sure none of it went walkies. The train departed at 7:40, and before long a chap in Army uniform asked us to identify our luggage so they could mark it with a fluorescent sticker. We were brought a bottle of water each and given the option of having a newspaper. Breakfast, if you can call it that, was served shortly afterwards. We were given a nice big tray but disappointingly, there were only two small biscuits and two Cadbury's éclairs on it. Tea was also served, but again there was only enough water for one-and-a-bit cups. I nibbled at the biscuits slowly, to make them last longer. I read the paper, or rather the Wimbledon update, which was the only interesting section.

Delhi is a bit like an urban jungle and the train was fighting to get out. Restricted to a ridiculously low speed we chugged through the suburbs. Eventually we reached the country and the train was able to speed up, making it feel as though we were actually going somewhere. Fortunately for me the next meal soon followed at 8:45am. Again another large tray was placed in front of me, containing two small slices of bread and a knob of butter. Well it was better than nothing I thought as I tried to work out whether it was all part of breakfast or if it were our next meal. I started to eat my thoughts when another waiter came round with hot meals asking whether I wanted the "veg" or "non-veg" option. I went for the non-veg option, which was probably identical to the veg option as it contained potato wedges, omelette and anaemic peas. Outside paddy field after paddy field went by. Women and children were already at work picking the rice, replanting the saplings or mending the mud banks, which kept the water in the fields. Little mud huts and piles of hay shaped like beehives sat in the corner of some of the fields. The British could learn from the Indian railways for the train was far better (and cheaper) than anything on British rails. There was loads of legroom. The carriage was fully air-conditioned and you got food, albeit small portions, and a paper to read. I fell asleep and when I awoke half an hour later Steve had written the events I'd missed in my diary. Apparently at 9:45am the train was raided by bandits, and at 10:08 the Martians landed, but were beaten off by Steve and Andy wielding ice axes. I always seem to miss the exciting things. It had started to rain.

The train pulled into Chandigarh station at 11:10am, where we disembarked, Steve forgetting to take his hat with him. We were ushered out of the station and across the puddle-ridden car park in the rain to a waiting tourist mini-coach. After looking at and wondering what the five of us were going to do with the twenty seven seats this vehicle offered we went back to the station, dodging the massive puddles, so we could use their toilets. Then it was back to the bus in the rain, where our luggage was being loaded. It was all there, something I wasn't sure whether to expect or not.

Stopping for fresh fruit at a roadside stall

The mini-coach left the station and headed out of Chandigarh. It wasn't long before we stopped by the side of the road so the driver could pay some road tax. I hoped this wouldn't happen too often, otherwise we'd never get to Manali. Only 245km to go!

They seemed to encourage the honking of horns in India as many vehicles have the words blow horn or honk horn painted on their rear. We stopped for lunch on the roadside at 12:10pm, by which time the rain had eased. Bananas and mangoes were bought from one of the many fruit stalls, and then it was back to the coach to eat them. I forced myself to eat a banana, not knowing when the next meal might be, while the others made a mess with the mangoes. We were held up momentarily at a check point but were soon on our way again. The wind started to pick up, making it noticeably cooler.

We stopped at a restaurant for a bite to eat. Rahul said it was the last place for the next three hours. I had chicken curry with dhal, a lentil curry and chapatti. The portions were large, but Steve ordered extra chillies as he thought they weren't hot enough. (The Indians traditionally like very hot food so Rahul had ordered us especially mild curries, much to Andy and Steve's dislike, while they ordered hot curries for themselves.)

We were back on the road by 2:30pm, by which time it had dried out. Before long the road turned into a single tarmac lane with bumpy gravel margins that we had to pull over onto every time a vehicle came in the other direction. We climbed through the Himalayan foothills, the roads winding up the shape of the hillside. Our mini-coach had some close encounters with goods trucks on blind bends, causing us to test the brakes. The views were hazy as we looked back across the perfectly flat plain from whence we'd come. We climbed up to a pass at 1200m, before U-turning in a petrol station and heading into a village, where people jumped out to relieve themselves by the roadside. Many more passes followed, each slightly higher than the previous one. The road followed large, mature rivers, but as the valleys steepened and as we approached the mountains, the rivers became smaller and more juvenile. Most of the other vehicles on the road were the bright orange goods trucks taking loads here, there and everywhere.

We stopped for a cup of tea at 6:30pm, in one of the many roadside dhabas. Bricks were put under the tyres of the mini-coach, to stop it rolling away. We soon got going again. The seat I sat in was self reclining. Every time we hit a bump, which was frequently, my seat would recline a bit further, until very soon I was lying in a half-prostrate position. As you can probably imagine I very soon got fed up with righting my seat and so I resigned myself to spending the rest of the journey on my back.

There was a brief stop for the drivers to get water at 7:30pm.

We arrived in Kullu in the dark at 9:30pm, to find a mega-gridlock. The culprit of this hold up was an abandoned tractor and trailer. There were cars, buses and lorries all joining in the chorus of horns honking. Before long quite a crowd had gathered and when they couldn't find the owner they got hold of the trailer and rocked it out of the way. It was a tight fit but our bus squeezed through, and we fought our way through the rest of Kullu, which seemed to go on and on and on. We passed through several more small villages, each buzzing with people doing various activities. Christmas lights hung from the front of shops and tress brightening up the dark streets.

We finally arrived in Manali at 11:10pm, pulling into the Hotel Victoria Palace, which had a nice stone facade. The mini-coach was unloaded as we located our rooms on the first floor. The hotel was sort of inside out with an open middle and long continuous balconies linking rooms with stairwells. Nice wooden décor was found throughout. The porters scampered around ferrying our luggage up to our rooms. Steve and Alan were in one room and a spare mattress was brought to Jon and Andy's room for me to sleep on. Alan and Steve had an oval bed in their room, which was as hard as rock so they ended up fighting over floor space to sleep on. Apparently the hotel was popular with bridal couples making us feel very foreign and out of place. We went to the hotel's restaurant for our evening meal at 11:50pm. I ordered a chicken Biriyani. While we waited we talked to Narinder about the next couple of days and what formalities we had to do. We ate our food, which was very nice, before heading to bed at 1am.