Seat of Our Pants

When booking our bus tickets to Manali, a town 300 miles from Leh, we were told it would be an 18 hour trip. Oh well, I thought, not really thinking about it. We had just taken a series of flights (from Flores to Bali, Bali to Kuala Lumpur, KL to Delhi and Delhi to Leh) so the pains of riding in a bus for that long had been forgotten.

The epic voyage started in Leh at 1:00am. The 11-seat bus drove straight to Manali, with the exception of three stops. One stop was for breakfast at a Tibetan-style bus stop. The second was a bathroom break, which means the bus pulls over in the middle of nowhere and you have to fend for yourself. I didn’t take part in the boulder-squat because it was too bloody cold to leave the bus. The third stop was another bathroom break (shown in the large photo at the top of this post). I left the bus (the sun had come up at this point) and was accompanied by a person that I couldn’t tell was a male or female. I had stage fright, naturally. There were no rocks to hide behind and the he-she was following me around, thinking I’d found a good spot.

The bus driver drove like a bat out of hell and we made it to Manali in 15 hours. The final 3 hours were spent speeding down the switchbacks overlooking Manali. There were no guard rails, no one directing traffic. Our driver, who couldn’t have been more than 25 years old, was tired and yelled at ever car that we passed.

It goes without saying that we drank a beer twenty minutes after setting foot in Manali.

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