Preparations for the Trip
While the Lalu/Saji bandwagon rolls on, let me share with you some of the aspects of the trip preparation.
The trip was originally conceived as a Joint Venture between me and Ramkya in 2008, but that year both of us had wrk-related problems and we had to call off teh trip.
For me, this was my 3rd trip, and I was determined to do the drives to Zanskar, Nubra and TsoMNoriri this time. UNlike the last 2 trips, this one was a North-South (Srinagar-Leh-Manali) drive.
The Route Plan was first made, keeping in view the following aspects:
- The run from the palins to the hills (nearly 2,500 kms of it, ex-Bombay) had to be fast and not consume more than 4 days either way
- We chose the month of September, knowing it to be off-season and season of best roads in Ladakh
- We had to bear in mind the (then) time restrictions in Jawahar Tunnel and Zoji La
The route plan that was drafted is linked below:
http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?k...1EV1E&hl=en_GB
The brief onward journey plan was as follows:
Bombay-Udaipur-Jaipur-Delhi-Pathankot-Srinagar-Sonmarg-Kargil
We planned to visit Zanskar V, Nubra V, Chumthang V and exit Ladakh via the Lahaul, Spiti and Kinnaur V.
Since it is not easy to understand a detailed Route Plan, there were some who said that their wives can't understand what they were up to. So, a PowerPoint presentation was made on the same Route Plan. That is linked below:
ladakh
Slowly, the team started building up and Ramkya kickstarted the mailing group that reached out to every potential team member - the mailing list was at times over 35 names long and we exchanged views and info for nearly 2.5 months, on some days the mails peaking at 35-50! We have lost track of how many 100s of mails were exchanged in the days running up to Zero Day.
We put a team list together, discussed who will bring his car, and how erach car will be filled up to optimise on costs and vacancies.
It was quite a task since the team was converging from different cities in India - 6 in the final count.
We froze the dates of travel 3 months in advance so that each member of the team could plan his work schedules and arrange his affairs for the trip.
Next stage, we went into intensive preparation on the things we needed to carry, how we should prepare ourselves mentally and physically, what medicines to have, etc. THisa was checklisted in the following link:
http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?k...dTaEE&hl=en_GB
Then came the most important part, preparing the cars. Since all the cars were M&M (all Scorpio, except the Bolero.....and later the Pajero), we checklisted the things to be done to get the cars ship-shape and 150% reliable. This is the checklist we used:
http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?k...RkVFE&hl=en_GB
The team started swelling up and at one point of time we had over 40 probables and nearly 10 cars in the line-up. There were several drop-outs, the most disappointing ones being those of Ramkya and Guderian. At one point in time, our oldest team member was 67 years old. We collected details of each person. Most of the team were either friends or drawn from Mahindra Scorpio Yahoo Group, team-bhp, bcmtouring or indiahighways Yahoo Group. Very few of us had even seen each other before and it was really quite a penpal gathering!
As the preparations were on, the team came up with some bright ideas for T-Shirts, Slogans and Stickers. So, after lots of consultations, the designs were chosen and we ended up with a Team Slogan, white team T-Shirts and Sticker for each car. (Lalu, can you upload the images of the T-Shirts and Stickers?)