Indira Gandhi International Airport
I flew in from Birmingham to Terminal 3; Lois, having spent a week with her daughter and family in South India, to Terminal 1. Miraculously, both our flights arrived on time and we managed to meet up – without the benefit of mobile communication as, being a Sunday, I couldn’t get an activated local SIM card – at 3pm as scheduled, outside the arrivals’ hall of Terminal 1C. A taxi ride across Delhi brought us both to Mandi House and the bus terminus for the Himachal Pradesh express.
The restaurant served meals from 12-3 and 8-10pm, which wasn’t particularly helpful as our bus left at 6.30, but they did manage to provide us with a coffee and later an omelette sandwich while we waited.
The night bus
The bus was comfortable enough with reclining seats and enough leg room, though the back of the seat had a ridge in the wrong place for a 6’2” person, sitting just below my shoulders, and the helpful leg rest had a nasty habit of suddenly breaking free of its catch to swing up and catch me unawares at the back of my calves. Still, we were together, and we were on our way.
As we crawled northwards through the Delhi traffic, I delved into my George Eliot novel, trying (somewhat unsuccessfully) to ward off sleep for now. The juxtaposition of early 19th century rural England with 21st century New Delhi was somewhat incongruous. Though, perhaps not too outrageously so, as Eliot’s descriptions of her characters’ corrupt and intimidating electioneering tactics wasn’t too far removed from some of the events I have previously seen reported in Indian newspapers in the run up to their elections.
As I nodded off and Lois helpfully rescued my Kindle from my knees, we gradually broke free of the congestion of Delhi to the somewhat freer-flowing highway north. Two hours in and we stopped at the ‘70 mile’ Dhaba for a toilet break and a delicious and sustaining Masala Dosa, before settling once more into our seats and surrendering to a fitful, jolting sleep.
Sometime after midnight we started climbing out of the plains and I sat up for a while, watching the lights of the towns below us recede to be replaced by those of scattered dwellings in the villages above. One has to marvel at the courage and tenacity of these Indian bus drivers as they career along the roads, dodging (or not) potholes, wandering cows, slower trucks, motorbikes and tuk tuks, and the blazing full-beam headlights of the oncoming traffic. They bring a new meaning to the concept of the double-blind experiment as one would, honking loudly, swerve to overtake a heavily-laden truck, overtaking another heavily-laden truck as all three veer round a hidden bend in the road. Perhaps it was just as well to re-cover my eyes with my eye shield and trust that ‘all shall be well’ as I gently dozed off again.
By two thirty we were bumping and winding too furiously to sleep as we started to climb higher into the mountains. I sat there listening to the cacophony of snores filling the coach, the part-empty water bottles rolling backwards and forwards across the floor with each new hairpin bend, and the frequent honking of a horn as we overtook, were overtaken, or met something coming the other way in a narrow stretch of the road. I must, though, have dozed a little more, as the next thing I knew it was starting to get light and the dark shadows around our coach gradually emerged into a deep, wooded valley, our coach traversing a precarious rock-hewn highway, with a wide and eventually cobalt-blue river far below us. The remnants of landslides and fallen rocks, the ongoing patches of road maintenance and the road works for a new, faster highway all added to the interest of the journey, and our driver deftly negotiated them all. The towns and villages sprawling along the length of the road were gradually coming to life, with several Dhabas open for business, numerous processions of young men carrying local deities down from the mountains for their annual re-consecration, a large flock of goats and sheep being herded by their shepherds, with pack-ponies carrying their goods and some of the younger baby kids. On the other side of the valley isolated dwellings, terraced fields, and the occasional monastery or temple stretched up the steep slopes, connected by defiant swing bridges or cable baskets.
Manali
And so, at eight-thirty we pulled into Manali’s muddy coach park near the head of the beautiful Kullu valley. The town with its packed-in jumble of buildings meandered up both sides of the valley and, high above, our first glimpses of Himalayan peaks shifting into the clouds.
