Jane's India Journals

Journals from 2001, 2003 and 2004

Sunday, October 01, 2006

Aug 17, 2001 To Manali

We’ve been a a very long, hot and dusty road from Chandigarh since 8 this morning. It is now 4 PM and after a lunch of chapati and dahl which we ate Indian style with our hands, we have started climbing into the foothills and it is starting to cool down. For now it is similar to going up into the Carmel Mountains in Israel, but the height of the foothills here is 2000 meters, as high as the HIGHEST peak in Israel, the Hermon on the Lebanese border where the only Israeli ski “resort” is located. Here, the mountains just BEGIN at that height!

Aug. 18….12:30 PM
I will continue with yesterday’s trip later, but right now I am sitting in the garden of our hotel right outside of Manali and it is even more beautiful than in the pictures. Filled with Zinnias, marigolds, flocks, asters, cosmos, roses, apple trees and grass. It is situated between rolling green mountains covered with green and pine trees-their peaks hidden by the mist.

 

It is pristine beauty at it’s peak. The only sounds we hear are birds and the flow of rapids and waterfalls which are everywhere in this amazing lush valley. The sky is so clear and the air so fresh-Behind this garden I see a vegetable garden with corn and don’t know what else. But we’ve been told the food here is among the best in India. Actually, from the faces of the people here, it looks more like Tibet or China .

The sun is amazingly strong even thought the air is clean and cool. We are only at 2000 meters now, 6000 feet and will eventually get to 4000 meters in Leh after a pass of close to 6000 meters! It is like the kind of rare spring days that we have in Israel that we wish would continue forever.

Well, we were given our room which is actually a suite-even has a fireplace!...and a small sitting room with 2 terraces and access to the garden. Very high international standard and it is costing us about $30 a night which is very expensive for here but I wouldn’t give this up for anyplace, and, aside from the fact that it is tortuous to get here, would love to come back.

Now backtracking a little, I woke up 2 days ago after our horrible day in Agra, feeling the beginning of “sick” throat, like sinusitis and a general poor feeling. We slept that day until after 10- did only emergency things in Delhi and at 4 met Milan, our guide and one of the other guys who is going with us. After that, we were too exhausted to do anything. And we had to be up at 6 AM.

Slept well and woke up not feeling any worse but not any better-but sometime during the morning I already had a slight fever. I’ve been using Vit C, propolis, echinechea, tea tree oil to gargle, Reiki, reflexology and some drops in hot water that A. gave me. But still, I am actually worse now. It is 6”30 on Saturday and we did not leave the hotel all day. …Back to the trip up to Manali….

After getting into the cooler foot hills, the ride was easier but I became car sick…probably shouldn’t have eaten so much at lunch right before the roller coaster roads…but a couple of hours later it passed and the rest of the trip I felt OK. We traveled until 10 PM and then found out the road was washed out to our hotel by the rains the same day, and so we stayed in another hotel until the next day when we could navigate the washed out road to the placed I described at the beginning of this post.