First Ride of 2012 Nangal to Manikaran (Day 1)

It was almost two months when I last made a long bike trip and whole credit for this inaction goes to Winters of Northern India. In my three days holidays, I thought of opening up the biking season for 2012. I had never been to Manikaran so my spirituality instincts encouraged me to thump my bullet in the valley of holy Manikaran.

Started late in morning at 09:00 PM, I rode from Nangal towards Kiratpur Sahib where I had to divert towards Manali highway. Freezing cold and fog on the way made my job difficult, though I had no choice than to pull the throttle and ignore cold wind.

During those 80 kilometer run from Kiratpur Sahib to Barmana, the ride became almost hell with truckers everywhere on road. This is the most scary stretch to ride as you feel helpless and are on the mercy of those adventurous truckers who are either overloaded and have almost no control on speed or driving on wrong sides. It took me almost 3 hours to complete this hell stretch wherein I could ride hardly at a speed of 40kmph.

Ride after Barmana became quite fascinating but the job was still not done as I had to ride another 170 kilometer to reach my destination Manikaran.

Roads were quite empty because of very less number of tourists in winters. By this time the day had become little warmer. I had opened the throttle to quite a large extent to cover up the balance distance.

The last leg of ride from Bhuntar to Manikaran (35 kilometer) was fascinating with broken roads, blind curves, steep uphill ride and above that very narrow roads. I managed to cover this distance in an hour time and landed at Manikaran at 02:00 PM.

The ride was too hectic with lesser number of stops to cover distance of 270 kilometer. The tiredness of entire day went away with the simplicity of Manikaran.

The first thing I did was to search a hotel to spend a night, so inquired one hotel which charged me Rs 400 per night with natural hot water for bath and TV without remote. The simplicity of room situated exactly in front of calmly flowing river convinced me to spend a night there.