LEDs

Very recently, I took few days off my work and went to some very exotic places in HP. One of my colleagues, Kartik Rajan, also joined me. Though, we had planned a long 7 days trip, for various reasons, our trip got reduced to only 4 days.

Kartik always wanted to go to Spiti (pronounced as “piti”) Valley, and so we planned to first go to Kaza, which is the main town in Spiti Valley. Though, after inquiry, we found out that it takes almost 16 hours to reach there. Considering the long journey, we dropped the plan and instead decided to go to Lahaul Valley.

We looked at the map again and found out that the town of Keylong, in Lahaul Valley, is just 115 km from Manali. So, we decided to go there. We started from Ghumarwin, and first went to Ghagas, a town on the main road from Bilaspur to Mandi. We hopped in to a Manali bound bus but got down at Bhuntar which is few kilometers before Kullu. From here, we took another bus to go to Kasol. Kartik has heard from one of his friends that it is a very scenic place, famous for trekking. While we both didn’t want to do trekking on this trip, we still went to check out the place.

At Bhuntar, we got into a private bus which was packed, and by the time it started, it was overflowing. People were perched on top of the bus also. When bus passed through Bhuntar town, few foreigners boarded the bus but on the top. I was surprised to see that they were at ease with the fact that they were traveling on the roof top of the bus.

The bus crossed the bridge on river Beas and very soon, it started going up hill. As usual, the roads were in zigzag form with hair-pin bends etc and a positive gradient. The unusual part was the speed and the way with which the bus driver was driving. He seemed to be playing with the steering wheel. There were times, when bus wheels were just six inches away from the edge and you could see the mighty-roaring River Parbati (one of the main tributaries of River Beas) flowing at a few hundred feet just below you. Incidentally, I had a window seat and at times, I wondered what would happen to us if the bus tumbles down. The only consoling factor during this thought was the presence of lots of trees on the steep slope. Overall, the journey was wonderful.

When we reached Kasol town, to our amazement, we could see mostly foreigners around. In fact, most of the tourists out there were non-Indians. As we were trying to find out a hotel room for ourselves, I witnessed sign boards and posters in some foreign language. Kartik told me that the language is Hebrew. It seems that the place is very famous with Jew tourists and they come and stay in Kasol for good 6 months or so.

Finally, we got ourselves a room, and we dumped our luggage and immediately went out for a walk. Within 2 min, we were walking on the road towards Manikaran. The sight was awesome. There are towering mountains on both sides with a mighty river flowing in the middle and a road running parallel to the river. It was just mesmerizing. We both were totally awestruck. We took some photographs and took a long winding path to go to the river bank. We also found a wonderful camping site with a restaurant just next to the river. After almost around couple of hours we returned back, had dinner at a restaurant and then retired into our room.

Next morning, we decided to walk to Manikaran, which is just 4 km from Kasol. The morning was so beautiful that I am short of words to explain it. The sun was out but was behind the mountain, which is on the side of the road. The sunlight was trying to sneak in between the gap of two mountains. River Parbati was its usual self – full of water and roaring. The birds were chirping and there were scattered white clouds at the peak of mountains. As we stopped by at a small dhaba (road-side restaurant) to have breakfast, I observed that trees had lot of dew drops on their leaves. Thousands of tiny droplets on the edges of thin, slender and pointed leaves started glowing like LEDs as soon as the sun-light managed to sneak in and fell on the trees. Very soon, they started emitting out different colours – shades of blue, red and orange!!! Kartik was busy taking photographs and I was busy locating different colours. Before this, I had only heard about the magical effects of early-morning dew-drops, but this was the first time, I witnessed it. For around half hour, I was totally lost. In whichever direction I turned my head there were Light Emitting Dew-drops on tree leaves, glowing in different colours.

Next to us, River Parbati was flowing with all its might, in the middle of two mountains, between the gaps of which, the sun was shining. The whole scene was very mystical. We both took our own sweet time to soak in the whole environment around us. We sat down at the dhaba for quite a while, before finishing our breakfast and moving on to Manikaran. I knew that this would go down as the best experience of the whole trip. At the end of the trip, I can firmly say - I was right.