Travelling in Himachal in June – 2007
Shimla >> Manali >> Rohtang >> Chandratal >> Ki/Kibber/Tabo >> Kalpa >> Shimla
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The first light of the day came at Kullu on my way from Shimla to Manali. My bus made its way along the banks of Beas that flowed in the opposite direction in a great hurry. From my bus, I could here the gurgle of slightly turquoise and transparent water rushing down the valley. The river bed was littered with boulders of all sizes. It is such an inviting flow that you would feel like stopping the bus and getting right down there.
Names like Kullu and Manali sound remote and dreamy when you hear about them from the plains below, but it is hardly so. The road is a highway and is put to good use by hoards of buses, trucks, private cars and yellow-board cabs. Resorts and camps are lined up all along the road, packed so densely that if you were to drive from Kullu to Manali stopping at each one of them for 15 minutes, it would take many weeks to reach the destination. But the journey gives many hints of what is in store further deep in the mountains. River runs cold and its color leaves the evidence of glacial origins. Temperature dips slowly and the road climbs up giving a sneak preview of white washed summits and tall trees. The anticipation of tomorrow rushes into the mind and overwhelms the moment.
Manali is a typical tourist town with hotels and resorts filling up every street, making room for tourists arriving in bus loads from the plains below. Trekking and adventure companies, cab hires, tour agents and restaurants are all that you see on the main roads. Oddly, I wasn’t harassed by touts on my arrival even though a few people gently asked me if I need a room. I offloaded my bag in the cloakroom and went in search of a place to stay.
A short walk put me in love with Manali despite its tourist crowds. Nehru park is quiet and charming with its alpine trees. You look up and you see snowy peaks in every direction with rocky slopes and coniferous forests below it. Picturesque is an overused word, but it perfectly fits what Manali is. I walked away from the bustle of the town and found a quiet hotel in old Manali right next to Manalsu stream coming down from the adjacent mountains.
Later in the day, I met a friend who arrived from Delhi by bus and we charted plans for rest of our journey and made preparations for it.
About Manali
Manali town itself doesn’t offer much in terms of sightseeing. There are a few temples – like the Hadimba temple and Manu Maharshi temple. Vashist, a village just outside Manali has hot springs and many budget guest houses. Solang Nala, which is a 30 minute drive from Manali on the way to Rohtang Pass is a place much visited by tourists. Solang has a ski slope operating in winter and turns into a place for paragliding and a few amusement-sports in summer. In summer, people visit the cave temple which is a short walk from Solang.
Most travellers use Manali as a base for a day-trip to Rohtang Pass. Rohtang Pass is one place which has an easy to access motorable road that can take you above the snow line for most of the year. Besides this, Manali is home to many travel agents and adventure companies that can organize treks, river rafting and jeep safaris in the Himalayas.
Accommodation is in plenty, and nearly every other road is full of hotels and resorts. Considering the number of tourists coming in from the plains in the peaks season, it would still be wise to book ahead if you are looking for mid-range accommodation.
Manali can be reached by buses from Delhi, Chandigarh and Shimla. Many people drive from these cities. Kullu has an airport which is 2 hours away from Manali.
Continued at Solang Nala
Travelling in Himachal in June – 2007
Shimla >> Manali >> Rohtang >> Chandratal >> Ki/Kibber/Tabo >> Kalpa >> Shimla
+ Previous: Driving to Shimla via Chail and Kufri
+ Next: Discovering Manali
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Finding a budget hotel in Shimla in the peak of the season is an ordeal you would not want to endure. Not that they don’t exist, but they come with their compromises. A few that I checked reeked of cigarettes, toilets stank and was not fit for normal people. Some more had no windows and no ventilation of any kind and had carpets releasing a dank smell, where the shameless hosts graciously offered to get rid of the odour by spraying antidotes which was nothing more than an equally unbearable perfume. A few clean budget hotels were far from where the action is but I wanted to be in the middle of it since it was my first, but a very short visit. Someone had told me that they do exist close to the mall but I never managed to find any. And our driver would tell me later with a mischievous grin that he knew a few good places but would not bother to tell me where. ‘Forget about finding a budget hotel near the mall,’ my friends who dropped me in Shimla had told me, and I think they said it right.
‘Splurge,’ I finally told myself myself after an unsuccessful search, and splurge I did. The hotel room I took in Shimla cost me exactly 22 times more than the cheapest accommodation I enjoyed in Himachal. But then, the cheapest acco was real cheap, a dhaba in a remote village – Batal – where we were one of the first tourists to arrive this summer. And then if I may add, we probably had 22 times more fun in Batal than in Shimla.
Sit back, relax and watch the world go by. That’s the best thing to do while in Shimla
That doesn’t mean Shimla is a bad place. On the contrary it is a place with a feel-good to it. And if you have come there from super heated Delhi of summers, you will jump with joy and love its pleasant air to no end. A 25 degree weather is not the only attraction of Shimla. It has an easy going and charming atmosphere where no one is in a hurry to go anywhere. Unless of course, you are travel agent or a tout with a target to hassle at least a few dozen tourists in a day. The mall road–the center of all attractions in Shimla–is (fortunately) closed for vehicles, which means people walk there merrily munching ice creams and candy floss, eating in one of its numerous restaurants or occasionally even singing and dancing right on the road. And the ridge, just above the mall often turns festive with tiny groups gathered watching a play, listening to a singer, watching Himachali women dance or indulge in the greatest ‘time pass’ of the entire country: munching something nice and warm sold by a street vendor. And when people have had enough of all that there are always benches laid along the road to sit and watch other people lost in indulgence.
Staying at one end of the mall road, I spent no more than a day in Shimla doing little more than walk to the other end of the mall and back, and then repeating the same walks a few times over. I would squat in a coffee shop or an ice cream parlour when I wanted a break and move on further looking for… well, looking for nothing in particular. The morning breakfast happened at the India Coffee House sitting next to a window overlooking the valleys of Shimla. The Coffee House’s dosas, idlis and coffees tasted precisely as they did in India Coffee House back in Bangalore. I was left wondering if they had it air-delivered from there. Further, I walked around the scandal point and up the ridge and found many more people walking aimlessly just like me. Gaiety Theater on the ridge, which William Dalrymple described as ‘unaltered since the last British sailed home’ is finally under renovation. A few buildings here and there do remain from the colonial era but the evidences of this being the summer capital of the British are not many.
The India Coffee House in Shimla. Yes, I was eating dosa with a fork and knife, because I was writing my journal through the breakfast
Further on the mall road, a few people are selling litchis, peach and a few other English fruits of which I would have probably heard of, but can’t associate the name with shapes. Many of them grow locally and I have a go at a few of them. A tall deodar forest appears bang next to the road beyond the secretariat, where, if you are brought blindfolded, you will definitely presume being in a forest and not a city.
It is evening before I know and it is time for me to move on. As I pack my bags and head out, I go with good feelings of Shimla but nothing to carry with me as memories. It is not one of those places where I feel sad to leave, even when it does have its charm. It is the deodars of Chail and Mashorba that are refusing to go away from memory and remain etched forever.
About Shimla
Shimla’s vicinity to Delhi, Chandigarh and Punjab makes it a popular summer retreat to beat the heat for people from these places. Shimla again sees tourists coming in large numbers in winter whenever it snows. There isn’t much in terms of sightseeing within Shimla, even when travel websites and brochures make a desperate push for a church or a temple here and there, the mall and the scandal point as places of interest. It is a place where the best thing to do is to hang around and kill time.
How-ever, there are many places around Shimla that have excellent vistas of lower Himalayas. Go to Chail, Kufri or Mashobra to enjoy dense deodar forests and some good views. There are more such places, like Naldehra, Narkanda and Kasauli, all within 2 hours drive from Shimla.
There are many hotels and resorts within Shimla and all around it, but finding an accommodation that is value for money at any range is difficult in peak season. So planning ahead is advisable.
Continued at Discovering Manali
Travelling in Himachal in June – 2007
Shimla >> Manali >> Rohtang >> Chandratal >> Ki/Kibber/Tabo >> Kalpa >> Shimla
+ Previous: Giri River Camp
+ Next: A Day in Shimla
+ Go to beginning of the story or index page
Four of us left Giri River Camp and drove towards Shimla, taking a detour via the deodar forests of Chail and Kufri.
Winding mountain roads took us through pine forests interspersed with villages and small towns. We drove through them slowly and gently at speeds varying from 20kph to a high of forty plus. It was often narrow, and dangerous at blind curves and a moment unaware could immediately take us a few hundred feet down into the valley. But it is not as bad it appears and the road is more scenic than fearsome. I did not get behind the wheels, but for me, love is driving in the mountains and I have done many thousand kilometers of it down south. Nothing to beat the might of the Himalayas though; where in the world can you find mountains so tall and steep and yet so well connected and inhabited?
The other folks in the car were veterans of Himachal who gave me plenty of dope on the local way of life, culture, people and places as we drove on. There were hilarious stories to know about rich folks of Kinnaur with excessive obsession to alcohol, about the kindness of people in the high mountains, richly beautiful landscapes of Spiti, of landslides blocking the roads every now and then and so on. Apparently public transport can sometimes be faster than your own vehicle in Himachal’s roads frequently affected by landslides; in case of a landslide you can just walk across the slide and hop into a bus waiting on the other side.
We drove via Solan town on the Shimla highway and turned towards Chail at Kandaghat. Initially a vegetation of stout trees and shrubs with a generally dry atmosphere, things started changing as we climbed up towards Chail village. A small village it may be, but not undiscovered by Delhi’s footloose population trying to escape from the summer heat. Resorts and hotels litter the way and giant ad-hoardings welcome you to their properties in Chail. But thankfully, Chail village itself is unspoilt as the region around it has been declared a reserve forest and no construction permitted. The village is tiny and is marked by an old palace of the Maharaja of Patiala(now a hotel, Rs.10 for visitors to see) and the world’s highest full size cricket ground(no entry for visitors, but you can manage a sneak peek) owned by a school managed by the army. It was a moment of nostalgia for one of my friends in the car who did his schooling here and went on saying ‘this was our dormitory.. this was our classroom..’.
Deodar Forests of Chail
Chail is a different world and demarcates itself from the rest with sudden surge of deodar trees. They grow densely with little space left between trees, climbing higher and higher in search of more sunlight. But for a few rays of the mid-day sun escaping the branches and falling on the tarmac, sunlight never makes it to the ground. The temperature dips considerably on approach to the village and you have to look hard to find a place to bask in the shine. The thick vegetation occasionally gives out in steep slopes, revealing the gigantic Himalayan valleys and waves of mountain peaks beyond them. The same tall trees also hide the concrete resorts and hotels on the road approaching the village.
The one main road on the village is littered with restaurants and shops, giving an unlikely feeling of a busy town. But it is hardly a hundred meter long and in a sudden twist, makes way for the prolific deodars. Chail is the quintessential Himalayan village perfect for travel brochures; an ideal retreat that has hardly changed much within its borders.
Chail’s main road, stretching no more than a 100 meters
We drove on from here towards Kufri and eventually to Shimla. The road to Kufri continues to be narrow and without much traffic. Soon after we descended from Chail, deodars disappeared and gave way to shorter trees. The valleys here were deeper and the peaks taller, time and again reminding me that we are amidst the Himlayan ranges. An hour of drive took us to the famous Hindustan-Tibet highway and eventually to Kufri where deodar trees made a comeback.
On the road from Chail to Shimla..
‘Kufri’s arrival is marked by horse shit,’ remarked one of my friends as he drove towards it. Sure enough, Kufri is crowded with horses meant to give joyride to tourists and we started seeing them miles before we reached Kufri. In the center of the village stood the horses and many drivers in a manner very similar to auto-rickshaws waiting for passengers in bus stands. Kufri also has a small zoo and an amusement park but none of them are worth the effort. But a walk along Kufri’s road, among the deodars at a height with vistas of the green valleys below makes being there worthwhile.
Before we hit Shimla, we stopped briefly at the tiny village of Mashobra, which hosted the famous Wildflower hall and offered views of Shali Tibba, the highest peak around Shimla. Sun had just set when we finally arrived at Shimla where I parted from my friends and walked in search of a hotel.
More Information
Chail is a little more than an hour away from Shimla and is well connected by buses. Roads are decent, and if you are used to mountain roads it is worthwhile driving. Chail village itself has no more than 2-3 hotels, but the road from Chail to Kandaghat is littered with resorts. There isn’t much to do in Chail except to walk around the deodar forest, but this is sufficient attraction to get there.
Kufri is 30 minutes away from Shimla on the same road that leads to Chail. It has some nice views and Deodar forests. You can go on horse rides and visit some tourist attractions like the zoo. Kufri is littered with resorts all around it.
Mashorba, which falls on the same road too is little more than 10km from Shimla. Although I haven’t seen any, the place is said to have a few guesthouses. There are a few restaurants along the main road. The attraction of Mashorba is similar – vistas of the mountains and deodar forest.
If you are driving and not planning to stay in any of these places, it should be possible to cover all these place in single day.
Continued at A Day in Shimla