Delhi to Manali

"Prayer flags at Kunzum La, en route from Manali to Spiti"

Even as we drove through the city at 4.30am, Delhi was still busy, but it wasn’t really until the next day after a few hours sleep in a simple hotel in the middle of town, that we wandered out into the streets and got the fully Delhi hit. Yes, there really are cows in the middle of the street, surviving on eating the rubbish of the hundreds of little markets that thrive on every street intersection. As well as the cows, to walk up the narrow streets by the railway station where we were staying, you had to negotiate bicycle rickshaws, motor rickshaws, taxis, mopeds and oxen with fully laden carts.

This is the Indian equivalent of wandering around the streets surrounding Victoria Station in the middle of London. In the market stalls we bought all the little things we needed for our trip, checked out the bicycle repair shops (just in case the bikes hadn’t survived the trip from the UK) and then went to meet our next challenge; finding the bus station and the bus that we were booked onto to take us the 16 hour drive up to Manali in Himachal Pradesh in Northern India and the start of our journey by bike to the remote and little visited Spiti Valley.

This was when we discovered that our bikes really were people (we knew that all the time), when we were told that for them to travel on the bus we would need to buy them a seat each. I trudged back in to the ticket office ready to argue that two bike bags didn’t really take up that much space, not really. I must have been convincing as the ticket man and let me off with buying just one half price child ticket for both of them. So now I know that my bike is not only a real person, but is just a little child too! The sixteen hour bus journey really did pass quite quickly, watching the city go by, eating Aloo Jeera and Dahl for supper and breakfast in local service stations, and finally gazing at the awesome river and mountain scenery of the Kulu Valley as we entered the cool and green town of Manali.

By now we were 2000 metres up in the foothills of the Himalayan chain. We stepped of the bus to be greeted by Cara. This was the first time we had met in the flesh and with all of our early delays and the problems of communication, it was good to finally arrive and Cara’s relief at our finally arriving was obvious. We unloaded the bags and jumped straight into a taxi for the short ride up to ‘Old Manali’ and the Sunshine Guesthouse were we hooked up with the rest of the team and spent a pleasant couple of hours on the terrace reassembling our bikes and talking shiny bits.