Wednesday, August 11, 2010

Tour Diary -Trip to Spiti Valley-Day Three+Four

Day Zero

Day One

Day Two

Murphy Law states that Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong and we had glimpse or probably the full-view of it during this trip. After coming back from the Chandrataal Lake, we thought of taking a break and rather than moving towards Kaza, we came back to Batal and decided to stay in the White House. The drunkards got hold of a bottle of rum and had fun. We collected wood, gunny-bags, something-like-coal and some dried horse shit to keep ourselves warm in the bone-chilling weather. Happily, we slept in the White House and early morning, we were going to enter into the Legendary Spiti Valley. However, the random function of life played strange and the next morning started a journey, which we had not dreamed of.

After warming up the car for few minutes in the morning, we sat inside it and after moving for few hundred meters, it gave up. The car did not start and its self-start broke down. We pushed it back to the Batal Camp, but it did not start at all. We were carrying spare fuses with us but the darn engine would not start. We believed that the car battery has failed us and the only possible solution was charging the battery through external source.


Rescue Measure1- Self Operation!


Rescue Measure2- Operation Tractor!

A tractor was standing nearby and the owner allowed us to charge our battery through his battery. As a matter of fact, it started raining and we were working on pushing~pulling~charging the car and ill-fated battery. After we charged the battery for a while, it did not work. We tow-chained it with the tractor and now the tractor was pulling the car. It did not work.


Rescue Measure3-Applied Engineering

Disturbed minds have never taken a good/wise decision and we did exactly, what we should not have done. We decided that two of us will stay at the place and two will go to Manali to get the mechanic. Jp+Varun decided to go to Manali, we gave them all the cash and I+Ujjwal stayed at the Batal_White House with minimal cash. However, we were optimistic and we were hoping them to return on the very next day. Ujjwal beat the shit out of me inside the white house. He lost his brains and he kept asking me, where would be they. When will they come back? Finally, I slept at 2AM and early morning, Ujjwal again started kicking me. Frustrated, I asked him about the problem and he gave me another wonderful news.

It had started snowing. In my 24 years of existence, I had never seen snow fall and when I saw it happening, I was not-at-all happy about it. To make things even worse, the Dhaba-Owner kept telling us the story of 42 Mumbaikars stuck in the very same place, one month back and how he helped them to stay alive during those 'six bad days'.

By the time it was 9 AM, the place was covered with snow and we hoped to stay there on a semi-permanent basis, considering the options we had. After, drinking at least 250(scale 25:1) cups of tea, a Tata Sumo arrived from nowhere. We requested them to take us with them and the driver agreed. However, he asked us to leave our luggage there as he did not want to trouble himself in one feet snow.

Snowfall
Beggars are no choosers, so we did what he wanted us to do. We left our bags there, carried the laptop and camera with us. After driving for 10 kilometers, we saw no road. Actually there was no road but all snow. The driver asked us to get down and find the road with him. The road was blocked and the boulders kept coming from the hills. We started working on the road-clearance job and after working in snow for one hour, the fingers were unable to move. The action coninued for another one hour and after that I felt like a snow pig. All I had with me was a pair of shoes, no jeans/lower/pants to change. I sat in my underwear inside the car to keep myself warm, as the clothes were drenched in water. Ujjwal had accepted his fate and he was helping other drivers/vehicles to find way in that mess.


Heavy Snowfall

'We are fucked snowfall'

जय माता दी !


We reached at Chatrru at 8 PM. 8 hours for 36 Kilometers and there was no sign of any accommodation. Finally, the party decided to sleep inside the car itself and we slept on the backseats of Tata Sumo.

The journey continues and Murphy Law prevails.

8 comments:

Atal said...

hmmm...........what a journey you all had!!!!!

"Beggars are no choosers"....liked it :p

wise donkey said...

wow so cool (literally)

6 bad days sounds scary:)

SuDhAnShU ShArMa (Buks) said...

Its Incredible India and Wonderland Himachal where wonders and incredible things can happen in a few hours. Waiting for the Murphy Law to prevail.

vicious said...

my god ...
those snow pics were awesome ..but being stuck in that must have been horrible !!
sitting in car in........ ahaa ! :-)

Anonymous said...

Best part of writing
"I had never seen snow fall and when I saw it happening, I was not-at-all happy about it"
things are not bed or good ,situation decide :)

Gaurav Vashist said...

Man this is just so awesomely amazing...

This is as if i am reading some version of Man Vs Wild.

Great..keep njoying the journey..and keep updating all of us with your excursion

Maya said...

awesome.. problems make for good stories

SANDEEP PANWAR said...

ऐसे ही स्नोफ़ाल में हम लगातार चार दिन फ़ंसते रहे वो भी बाइक पर