Himachal Trip -The Great Fall

It was 04:30 am. The alarm rang. Within the first ring of the alarm, I was wide awake. Usually, I snooze the alarm five to six times before I force myself to wake up, but not today. The day had finally arrived. The four of us, Aman, Rohit, Pratyaksh and I were going to Manali for our trip. This trip was a long time coming. I still remember how all of us, in our school days, used to plan all our trips and would never do them, but we used to plan them anyway for the fun of it. But, at last, we were finally putting our plan into action. This trip was spontaneous, and initially, planned as a joke. But somehow this naive pointless joke of ours became one of the best trips of our life.

It was a cold morning in Bangalore. Bangalore is notorious for its cold mornings. The funny thing was that I was feeling cold here, and I'm going to be going to a place where the temperatures at night drop below 0 degrees. I took a nice warm shower, which was, incidentally, my last warm shower until the end of the trip; then packed my bags, had my breakfast and left.

I met up with Pratyaksh downstairs near the cab. People looked at us weird, our driver included, because we were carrying huge trekking bags, with heavy leather shoes and 2 to 3 layers of clothing. We got into the cab and waited for Rohit to show up. We called him, and he picked up saying he was leaving his house now. Classic Rohit, always late for everything. Anyway, Rohit made it to the pickup point just in time, and we rushed to the airport. We got our tickets, checked our luggage in, did the security check and waited at the terminal for our flight.

Our initial plan was to fly all the way to Kulu, and then take a cab from there to Manali. But there was only one flight every alternate day to Kulu, which made the flights very expensive. So we decided to fly to Delhi, where we would meet up with Aman, and from there take a 17–18 hour bus to Manali. Yes, you read that correctly, an 18-hour journey! We anticipated the journey to go smoothly, but boy, oh boy, were we wrong.

We boarded the flight to Delhi, which was supposed to take 2.5 hours, but ended up taking 3.5 hours because of traffic (classic Bangalore!). That was our first hiccup in the series of events to Manali. All of us had vowed not to eat the ridiculously expensive food on the flight. But, for some reason, all the people around us decided to buy food or get their own food. Our taste buds and noses were tingling. Long story short, we blew 500 Rs. on noodles which had a watery taste to it, and the worst part was the quantity was so less. We knew we got scammed, and we felt the guilt.

We landed in Delhi, and the moment we got off, the air hit us hard. This was our first time in Delhi, and 30 minutes of staying there, all of us had an ashy taste in our mouth. We did get used to it after a few hours, but initially, it did get the better of us. We had a few hours to spend in Delhi before we had to board our bus, so we decided to explore the capital city.

We saw two extremities of people there; one was the extremely rude one -When we went to buy metro tickets, we asked the guy at the counter for directions. His reaction was complete silence, not even a single word; We asked him 3 to 4 times before giving up. He then threw our money at us for no reason. I don't know what he was so angry about. The other extremity was the helpful and polite one - one of the whom realised that we were struggling with directions, so he came over and told us the best places to roam around, cheap places to eat at and where to get transport. We found that so helpful.

Pratyaksh had to get a beard trimming done. So we asked Google for the nearest barber place. Google suggested a place that was hardly 600 meters from us. We thought ' excellent', this is within walking distance. So we started walking towards that place. We come up to the place, and we get the biggest shock. There was a guy with a razor blade in his hand, a rock on the floor to sit on, and one mirror. This was the barber's place. We don't know how this place even ended up on google maps. We could have gone here, but we had a lot of luggage with us, and this shop was near a busy area, so we were sceptical about it.

We found another place 750 meters away, and when we reached there, it was one of those high end, luxurious haircut saloons, where they offer tea and coffee to you, have a huge sofa in the waiting area, double-storied place etc. (Again 2 extremities!). We didn't want to go in, but similar to the food on the plane, Pratyaksh decided to get his trimming done there, and please don't ask me how much he paid. It was a lot.

We wandered around for the rest of the evening in a cycle auto. We first went to Chandni Chowk, and then he took us to a place near the Jama Masjid. Apparently, you get the best butter chicken there. After an early dinner, we headed towards the bus station, where we finally met up with Aman. We sat there waiting for the bus. All of us were pretty tired, and we just wanted to get on the bus and sleep for the entire journey. But sleep was the last thing that we got on that bus.

We saw each bus leave one by one, each of them a nice, air-conditioned, push back seat, bus. We were all ready to jump into our bus and sleep. Then our bus arrived. It was one of those buses, which people travel within the city, not a long-distance one. It had no air-conditioning, no push back seats, it had a terrible suspension, and half the seats were torn apart and oily for some reason. Our hopes of getting a good night's sleep were shattered. We couldn't believe that we had to travel 18 hours, 18 HOURS!!!, on this bus. We just gave up and got on the bus. We took the last seat so that all 4 of us could sit together - the worst decision of our life.

The roads from Delhi to Manali are not straight. They are curved, serpentine and bumpy. 6 hours into the journey, and none of us has gotten any sleep. We were gripping onto our dear lives as we were flung and thrown around in the last seat. Our head was spinning, our hands were hurting because of holding onto the rails, and to add to all that suffering, the bus was freezing. But, somehow we fell asleep.

Sometime later, Pratyaksh and I woke up at the same time. Rohit was sleeping in a seat in front of us next to the door. At one point, the driver took a sharp turn, and immediately we heard a loud sound. BAAM! Rohit had ended up upside down near the door of the bus. He had tumbled from his seat and hit his head near the door. Pratyaksh and I were taken aback. It took us a good 30 seconds before we understood what had happened. Rohit too was in shock. He was still near the door, with his head upside down. We laughed about this incident later, but this could have gone badly, had the door been unlocked. He could have just fallen off, and none of us would have been aware. We had a long day ahead of us tomorrow so, the rest of the night, we held onto each other and slept.