We arrived in Manali looking forward to a month of kayaking, chilling and of course riding our Enfield Bullet around the valley.
We were back in the Tourist Hotel, our home from home you could say! The flowers were out and our terrace was an array of red, orange and yellow. The Thakur family put a huge effort into making the garden really warm and welcoming.
However, it was not long until we had made a plan to head into the Lahaul Valley to kayak the Chenab and Chandra Rivers. However, within a day of getting our kit ready, buying our food and petrol for the expedition the weather quickly changed and a front came in from the West in Pakistan dropping the temperature and also a lot of rain. The next morning we were greeted with fresh snowfall up in the mountains. As we were driving up the notorious Rohtang Pass the clouds broke and the sun started to burn through. The views were unbelievable...
We passed a crew trying to keep the road open until the end of the season. Every year there is substantial damage to the road either from the Spring snow melt or from the monsoon rains. This year it was the former as the monsoon had been particularly weak in Himachal Pradesh.
The snow had reached the road maintenance crew during the early hours but it seemed the best way for the women to stay warm was to break more stones to secure the road wall to stop it collapsing altogether. Back in Europe if you had convicts breaking stones to build roads it would be against their human rights, in India it is a job!!!!
Take nothing away from these road builders their job is horrendous but they are a huge integral part of the machine that keeps India's northern roads open for all sorts of traffic into some of the most extreme terrain you would find on the planet.
As we headed further up to the pass the weather started to change for the worst. The clouds were coming in and the temperature again started to drop. We crossed the pass with very little visibility, it was only as we started to drop height that we finally saw the whole of the Lahaul Valley in a blanket of snow. It took roughly two hairpin bends later for us to decide that this was not a good idea. With snow all the way down to the river and the next cold front pretty much above us we realized that it would be more of a fight against the extreme cold than kayaking a sweet river and as there is no need to go boating in the snow especially when in another part of Himachal there will be sun, warm temperatures and whitewater.
We crossed back over the pass and our decision was looking at becoming the right one!
While the Indian tourists from the plains were playing in the snow for what was most likely the first time they had ever encountered snow and also now snowfall...
……we were trying to get past the parked cars, traffic both which includes yaks, goats, sheep and everything that is the circus of the Rohtang Pass!
The snow was falling and we wanted to get back to Manali and hatch a new plan.
That plan was the River Ravi and the Chamba Valley…...
