Glimpses: Medieval Europe

Some glimpses from the older part of Switzerland. The first one is from inside Chateua de Chillon at Montreux - a french castle in the southern part of the country (adjoining France). The castle itself was good but not all that impressive - perhaps having seen monuments of great architectural grandeur constructed by the Mughals in India, I was expecting more. But the views from inside the castle were breathtaking. The castle opened out to a lake on 3 sides, and the alps can be seen in the backdrop.

The rest of the images are from the old part of Zurich. While most of the old houses in the area have been converted into restaurants and cafes (pic 2), there were still some residential homes in the area. And who can take a walk in old Europe without feeling awed by the medieval churches. The good thing about Zurich is the co-existence of the old and the new. The extremely cosmopolitan area near the main train station with all the banks and the malls etc., is just a stone's throw away from the oldest part of the town. They haven't allowed the history to rot in some forgotten section of the town. And that's something that we could take a lesson from in India :)

Jung Frau Joch

Some pics from the highest peak in Europe. It's been a fun weekend, and though I promised I would write a lot more, I'm just going to sign-off with those pictures, and atleast keep my promise of having written here at all!

BTW, that trek was awesome - around 4 hours of breathtaking views. If you go there, make sure you walk some part of the distance - the train goes to the very top!

Backcountry Switzerland

After postponing for months and months, I'm back to clearing my backlog on writing about my India/Swiss trip this summer. I spent one week in Switzerland before continuing on to India for 4 weeks. Even though 1 week wasn't quit enough to explore the whole country, it was just enough to get a taste of life in one of the most visited tourist destinations in Europe (and unfortunately, one of the most expensive ones too!!).

The swiss are known for their pride in the way they decorate their houses, the technical and artistic exquisiteness of their watches, their chocolates (especially dark chocs), and last but not the least, their finely cut suits and dresses. All of the above traits are visible all over the country - be it the extremely cosmopolital Zurich, or the backcountry in Luzern, Bern or any of the older towns. The country is very well connected through a public transport system consisting of trams, buses, railways, cable cars, and boat rides! A travel pass entitles you to all the above listed means of transport, and considering the amount of money we have to pay for public transport in the US, it is really very economical. The best way to explore the country is to get a 1 week travel pass, trek in the back country during the day, and come back to a bigger city like Zurich, Lausanne, Geneva etc. at night. I spent one night in a youth hostel in Zurich, and the remaining 4 days with a friend who goes to school in Lausanne. The major touristy area is Interlaken - and it is so with good reason. The highest and the most beautiful mountains of Europe are in this area, with Jung Frau Joch touching around 4700m. The swiss have done a great job of promoting tourism in the area - there's a train that goes upto around 3600m from where you get perfect views to Jung Frau peak!! I did a trek down from that height, and it was nothing short of amazing. The mountains in the area are lush green, and it seems like they are being taken care of by gardeners coz the grass is almost evenly cut all over the region.

Above are some pics from my trek in the countryside in Luzern (about 1 hr from Zurich), and will post the pics from Jung Frau in my next posting.

North Georgia Mountains!

It already seems like ages since I made any trips (and the India trip was just a month back!!). The routine of life has taken over so quickly, that all the resolutions I made about changing my outlook towards life - all the richness of experiences that moved me while traveling, have been almost forgotten. I guess that's why all the explorers and adventurers have this almost physical urge to get out of their normal routine life and travel. And I guess that's what's described as travel lust in the dictionaries :)

Well last week I was seized by travel lust once again, and off I was with a bunch of friends and family. After traveling alone to Switzerland and India for more than a month, this was a pleasant change. There was 12 of us as we headed towards the mountains of north Georgia/southern Tennessee for a weekend of camping and river rafting.

Being such a large group, and of course all of us being Indians, it was almost impossible to have started at the time that we originally fixed for our departure!! I guess we Indians have a decent workaround this problem - just stipulate the time for around an hour or so earlier than you actually intend to leave, and everbody's happy. The amazing thing is that in spite of us being 12 people, I think all of us got ready around the same time (being equally late by more than an hour), thereby confirming the fact that the concept of IST (Indian Stretchable Time) works out very well if the group is all Indian. If you have even a single non-Indian in the group, well, then they have to learn the lesson the hard way by waiting up :)

Anyways, it was a nice pleasant evening drive up the hills - which are somehow not the part of the Smokey mountain range but are geographically located very close to them, as to the famous Applachian trail (that runs from Georgia in the south to Maine in Boston in the north - look up the map for east coast of the US). We reached the campsite at around 9pm - when most of the other campers in the area had already BBQ'd and were putting out fires and getting ready to sleep, we were putting up our tents, and looking for firewood for cooking :-D. Somehow we got done with dinner by midnight (and we already had a ranger give us a warning about making too much noise). That's when someone(*) had the brilliant idea of telling ghost stories to each other. All of us gathered around 2 candles in one tent, and slowly but surely the stories started pouring out. By around 2:30 am, all the brave souls in the tent could be given a shock treatment by the
sound of the wind against the leaves, or someone's palms against the tent, or even a cockroach walking blissfully on the tent unaware of the effect it was creating (that was me who woke up at 4am and figured it was a cockroach and not some blood-thirsty vampire lol).

Somehow everybody made it through the night - ALIVE, and it was time for some adventure. We started with a game of volleyball, which soon became so rowdy that we had to end it at one game apiece. We left for Ocoee river after that for an afternoon of river rafting. Having done rafting on the Ganga in India, I wasn't very excited about rafting in the US, as I had been told that the rapids on the Ganga are some of the best in the World. I was pleasantly surprised with the rapids on Ocoee, and also with our raft guide, who made sure we had fun being absolutely drenched! And I, the only one who had some rafting experience in our raft, was the only one who fell into the water while we were traversing one of the rapids. The coolest thing was that someone was clicking pictures from the bank when I fell into the water, so I have an almost slow-motion record of my fall in the water (and I also know who all in the raft tried to help me, and who all were laughing their asses off!!). I'll post those pictures in an update to this post.

All in all, excellent trip - the best kind of fun that you can get in the US (with all the concerns for safety surrounding EVERYTHING adventure related).

(*) That someone's my Bhabhi (brother's wife), but I didn't want to take names in the middle of the blog :-D. But I guess that was one of the best ideas of the trip for the amount of fun we had coz of it - in spite of the shivers!!

Nubra Valley - A desert at 3500 metres!!

Continuing the motorbiking trip, we started out for Nubra Valley on the 4th day in Leh. Nubra Valley is about 120km from Leh, and the variety in the landscape for that short a distance is astounding. You start with the barren mountaints surrounding Leh, climbing up to the world's highest motorable road - the Khardung La pass - which is 40 km from Leh. The ascent is steep - within those forty odd kilometres the road climbs more than 2000 m (Leh is at 3500m, Khardung La is at 5660m!). The road is in a surprisingly good condition for the first 30 of these kilometres, and extremely bad for the remaining 10!! Some pictures from the ascent to Khardung La ..

To give you an idea of the road conditions near Khardung La, sometimes there were streams flowing across the road that had knee deep water. You need some skill in motorbiking to negotiate those without getting your feet wet! The trick is to accelerate just before the water-body, and then once you enter the stream, slacken the acceleration and let the momentum carry you through. I got my shoes wet a couple of times before disovering the trick (and that, believe me, was NOT very pleasant!!):)



The air at Khardung La is extremely thin, and 5 minutes of walking at that height had me gasping for breath. There were tons of tourists who had driven from Leh, and majority of them were Indian tourists who usually never get to see the snow. There's nothing much to do at Khardung La though - the place just has a small army camp, and a budhhist temple (other than all the snow, which people were busy digging into for the snow fights :). Met a bunch of people from NZ and Spain who had come there haveing hauled their bikes on the taxi, and they were planning to bike down the distance to Leh. Good idea - I would never do that distance biking uphill! Some pictures ..







Pictures from Nubra Valley follow - observe the change in the landscape after the descent from Khardung La. The colors change from white, to barren brown of the mountains, to green of the villages, to the brown of the sand-dunes in Nubra Valley. YES, there are sand-dunes at the height of 3500 m. Heck, they even have camels!! You don't believe me? That's why I clicked pictures for you :)

Above is a small village - it's interesting how the locals judiciously use water for irrigation to produce Barley (which is the principal crop of the area). The region gets 4 inches of rainfall a year - to keep things in perspective, the year Bombay had floods it got 37 inches of rain in one day. So 4 inches of rain means there's always an acute shortage of water. The locals use the water that melts from the snow (that's the streams we encountered on the roads) and very amiably divide that between their fields. The result is the occasional extremely green patch of land that you see, and it signifies habitation - otherwise the whole area is absolutely barren.




Camels in Nubra Valley!! And no, they haven't been brought from Rajasthan! These are the local camels, and notice the amount of fur they have on them to protect them from the harsh winters (as well as the harsh sun in summers!). They are special double-humped camels (the ones in Rajasthan are single-humped) that are found in only 2-3 other places in the world (or that's what the locals told me).





Those are 2 trucks in the middle of a road in the middle of a huge huge desert. Amazing, isn't it?

In and around Leh

It's been a week in the US now, and what I thought I would post in the first 2-3 days is still overdue. A new job, a new set of people to work with, new place to live, new roommates (well still searching for new roommates!!) - all have contributed to the delay. I need to utilize this weekend to clear up the backlog.

So having made the trip from Manali to Leh in the last post, it's time for in and around Leh. The city of Leh is like an oasis in the desert. After being on the road for 18-20 hours on empty and deserted roads, the city welcomes you with a buzzing life of a foreign tourist centre. Mind you, it's not noisy, and the traffic is also not bad either (though people were saying it's worsened over the last few years) ... but after the Manali to Leh roadtrip, which has only one "town" on the way, Leh seems like you're finally returning to civilization.

Day 1

On the first day, all I could do was sleep (on my stomach!!!!), and rest my butt. The guesthouse I was staying with Obi was excellent considering the amount of money we were paying for it - Rs 300 per night for a double room. It's amazing how all the hotels at the hillstations where Indian tourists throng are so expensive (check out Shimla or Manali), but the foreign tourist destinations are cheap (say for example Vashisht near Manali, and Leh!). The guesthouse owner in Leh (Ser-Dung guesthouse) was attributing it to the facilities that the Indian tourists demand - Air-conditioning, TV with all the cable channels, western style toilets etc. Compared to that, most guesthouses in Leh are pretty bare - the rooms are clean and tidy, but bare with respect to facilities. I didn't mind that coz in any case for most part of the day I was out of the room.

Anyways, in the evening on the first day, we (Obi and me) went to the Shanti Stupa, which was a newly built structure a couple of kilometres from the town centre, and it overlooks the city. The views were very nice especially as we went at sunset.

Day 2 and Day 3:

We spent the two days figuring out the logistics for planning out a trip to Nubra valley. We wanted to rent bikes and drive to the valley, which is around 120km from Leh. You need to have permits from the DC (Distric Commissioner) office because that area has restricted entry as it borders with China. Apparently, something that we thought should take us 1 hour, took us almost a day. There was some weird rule on how a foreign tourist cannot get the permit if in a party of less than 4 people. And like everything in India, the travel agencies have a way around it. We found a guy who runs a travel agency, and he had told us he would get us the permits for Rs 200 (they are free if you go directly to the DC office). What he did was - he had three fictitious passports and visas (fictitious as in they were real people, but had travelled to Leh probably 2 years back) - and he clubbed Obi's name with them to make it a party of four. So Obi got his permit with 3 other people who were probably in Europe, Australia or the US!

To add to the problems, we ran out of money. Well not exactly - what happened was that Obi's debit/ATM card didn't work at any of the outlets in Leh coz it wasn't a MasterCard or Visa. Both of us had to buy airtickets to fly out of Leh - so I converted all the cash that I had (around $200) and we pooled in all our money to buy the tickets. After we bought the tickets, we had a total of Rs 400 amongst the two of us!! In the meanwhile we had figured out a way to get Obi's money - he called up his gf, actually his ex-GF, to tranfer some NZ dollars via Western Union. But because the tranfer takes a day, we were left with Rs 400 for the day. By the evening, we were left with Rs 100 (after a few phone calls to NZ for getting the money transferred), and we were yet to have dinner! As luck would have it, we ran into Remi, the French guy - and we had to ask him to sponsor our dinner. He was gracious enough to oblige us after belittling us for a while :)

We did rent out bikes on the afternoon of the third day, and we went to see some monasteries around Leh. Some glimpses ..

Glimpses - Manali to Leh

For all the advice that I got from people about traveling from Manali to Leh, I was still grossly unprepared. No no - I had all the pills for AMS (Acute Mountain Sickness), I had stuff for motion sickness, and I was even prepared for an upset stomach in the case of diarrhoea. But what I really needed, and what nobody told me that I would need so bad, was ... A CUSHION! Yes, that's what I mean - just a pillow or a cushion - or just something that takes all the bumps as a shock absorber. Because after 21 hours of riding a rickety Sumo on one of the world's toughest roads, my condition was worse than that of Sameer (Saif Ali Khan) in Dil Chahta Hai after he hitches a ride from Bombay to Goa on a truck. Hell it was worse than having 3 GPL's one after the other (if you don't know what GPL is, search for GPL and IIT Kanpur lingo on Google!). Anyways, it took me 3 days to recover before I could rent a bike and brace myself to being a road warrior again.

Anyways, coming back to the journey - it was a 21 hour marathon run which started at 2 am and finished at around 11 pm!! The driver took 3 breaks of around 20 mins each - other than that it was non-stop driving, rickety roads, loud music, and continuous charas smoking (not to mention the middle-aged guy behind me who would fall on my shoulders every few minutes coz he would fall asleep!!). So the taxi works this way: you pay according to the seat you want - the middle row seats are the highest - I paid Rs 1600 for mine in the middle row next to the window. Next come the front seats with the driver, and the cheapest are the 4 seats in the back (and you really need to have a stomach of a devil to not feel sick on those 4 seats). I had great company in the middle row - a frenchman and a kiwi. The Kiwi (his name was Obi) would be my travel partner for the next 5 days. The Frenchman, Remi, was a journalist in France, and was in Leh on a 4 month contract with a trekking agency to accompany French tourists on treks in the area - how I envy the guy - getting paid for trekking in some of the best trek routes in the world!!

Well to cut a long story short, I'll just have to present some pictures, because the beauty of the area is indescribable in words!!

This is the first stop that we made after starting from Manali - right after Rohtang Pass.




Some shots that I took from the Sumo ..


Can you believe that!! That's THREE HUNDRED AND SIXTY FIVE KILOMETRES!!!


Some more shots ..



That's Darcha - yes thats all of Darcha, one of the places for which we kept waiting 2 hours, and for which we were seeing milestones for about 70 km.

Just to give you an idea of how wide the road was ..

Some parting shots ..