It was the day to finally meet our Royal Enfield, the bike that would take us from Himalachan Pradesh to Ladakh. We rented the bike from a reputable garage in Manali called Anu Autoworks. Anu, the owner, gets raved constantly on travel forums as a trustworthy, good mechanic with incomparable knowledge of the area. We got a lift to the garage from Gudu, the owner of the guest house where we were staying in Old Manali (Orchard House). He insisted to come as he us...

Being in Manali means seeing two strikingly different towns. On one hand New Manali is offering quite tacky entertainment for tourists coming in crowds from the indian cities, on the other Old Manali is a more quiet green area which attracts mainly people who want to chill out and enjoy the mountain views. In Old Manali, higher up on the mountain,people seemed more open and ready to share some of their culture and knowledge with us. We stayed among cherry and ...

...to pick up from where we left off on the previous post, the train ride to Chqndigarh was indeed very smooth in the first class of the Shatabdi. Little did we know that the tough part was yet to come...the bus ride! It takes 10 hours for the bus to go from Chandigarh to Manali. Once in Chandigarh we swum through the multitude of people to reach an "official" taxi rank. On the taxi we bargained 50rupees off the total price for no AC during the journey...not t...

Getting the Shatabdi Express train from Delhi has been the first real eye opener in this country. From the moment we stepped out of the taxi we were trying to keep all our luggage (2 backpacks and 2 bags) to ourselves. There are all sorts of people taking trains in Delhi, from the richest to the poor, but most of all there are a lot of people taking trains from Delhi. All fennelled through a single gate for security. A massive sweaty rush of people, hands and f...

See Delhi in a day?!?well it was quite an intense day especially because of the humidity which in this season really makes you feel like entering a Turkish bath rather than walking in an Indian city... We did realise this place has 15 millions inhabitants, judging by the number of cars-bikes-whole families on a motorbike I am fairly sure I have seen at least half of them! For every person doing a task there are at least two standing around and looking. My favo...