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?