We are vehicle tourers. We see a lovely destination, find out if it can be driven to. If it can, we drive there, if it can't be driven too, we forget it.
The Dusshera weekend put us in such a dilemma.
3 days... where to go?
All places which can be driven to in three have been driven to. UK we did not want to go, so where in HP.
Well easy, we will go to Tirthan again.
And then an idea crossed my mind. Why not take left from Larji and go to Sainj, instead of going right to Tirthan valley from Larji?
Well the plan was finalized. We will stay atleast one night in Sainj, or maybe 2, or we will do 1 night in Sainj and tirthan
This gave us a day in the GHNP, and this time we decided to do something we normally never do.
"Trek"
It is a strange word, and frankly speaking I have always found people who did this "weird". Please pardon me, but I am quite lazy, and my idea of ultimate fitness is to run 2kms on the treadmill in 12 minutes. Nothing more nothing less.
So here we were, on the silly NH1 heading towards Aut.
I would not bore you with the gory details of the plains travel, which involved pressing the brakes more than the horn, and the horn more than the accelerator.
I am told this is all for road widening, which will finish in 2011 November.
However, the boards do not say whether the road widening work will finish in november, or whether the road itself vanish by November 2011.
I suspect the latter, going by the speed of progress, but those are all philosophical questions.
Coming back to topic at hand, it was afternoon that we hit the mountains, and the ardous task of slow moving truck navigation started.
Finally around 6pm, we were near Sainj
Or to be more precise what was left of Sainj.
You see, govt is building a Dam. A real big dam. and when dams are built the roads get ruined, the vegetation gets ruined, and the entire area looks like post apocalyptic nightmare, more so at night.
As luck would have it, every local told us different directions to our rest house.
And I was worried that even a days stay at this place was a bad idea
But what to do. We had come there, night had fallen, and we were still searching for the rest house.
Somebody guided us up a narrow dirt trail, a pretty rocky trail, and precisely after climbing 2kms, I realized 2 things.
The right suspension/tie rod whatever was making some real loud khat khat noises. And that we were on the wrong path, going to some village somewhere else.
Well that meant U turn, which is quite a task on such roads in the safari.
After more going in circles we found an Alto(God bless Maruti), and they guided us to our FRH.
Unlike most other FRH, it was smelly and not very "scenic". Heck, it was not even in a forest.
Though night had fallen, it was only 8pm or so, and we had plenty of time to plan
First thing I did, confirmed our Tirthan booking for the next day. It was just a 1-2 hour drive from here.
Secondly we decided, we will go to neuli (further upriver some 10kms), park at the road's end, trek into the forest.
Now where will we trek into? And what will we see.
Well you see, we are not trekkers, and I do not have any ideal about this trekking business.
All I know was google, and google showed pics of meadow when I keyed in Sainj.
The Google earth satellite image suggested this was located right at the top of the mountain next to the road end.
So thats where we will go. As for route, etc., etc., that was something we will check out at Neuli
With that it was time to sleep
Sorry, no pics of the the day.
We were mostly driving and getting lost.
However, in order to not get abused, I will post some which are called "Teasers".