Almost Ladakh - Getting ready for the bike ride

Manali is a tourist town on the banks of the Beas river. The main attractions here are the Hadimba temple - a 1553 Hindu temple dedicated to the Goddess Hadimba and built in the style of a Buddhist Gompa; the nature park - a nice park by the banks of the river; the Mall road which allows you some decent shopping (do visit the Tibet Emporium, some really good stuff available there); Vashisht - a very passable place 3 kms from the town, the attraction being hot springs; Solang Nallah - some 15 kms from the town and having an adventure sports institute.
The nearest airport is Bhuntar, the railhead is Kalka/Pathankot. Buses to Manali are plenty from any of these places, but luxury coaches will need to be booked in advance. Being a tourist place, taxis are not difficult to find, and it is possible to get good deals.

First thing we did in Manali was to find a hotel to stay for the night. We chose Hotel Beas View (run by Himachal tourism) because it fit our budget, because Bhatti recommended it from an earlier stay, and because we were too lazy to go check out other places. It's an average hotel for the price, but has a small-but-great balcony overlooking the Beas river. Manali is full of hotels and with a little bit of searching you can find a really good place. The budget places run by Himachal tourism are generally not very well maintained, so look at other places for value for money.

Next in line was lunch. We went to a place called Khyber (End of mall road where the road diverges to Rohtang and Leh). It's a very passable place, but for some reason we just kept going there all the time we spent in Manali! The commonly available beer in Manali is either "Golden Eagle" or "Godfather", both pretty lousy. KF is available, but not everywhere.

After a couple of drinks and lunch, we were ready to get on with business. Our original plan gave us 1 day in Manali to find bikes for our ride to Leh. We enquired around and found a couple of places. Most of them had Enfields to rent out, and we were initially skeptical about these. These bikes are heavier and difficult to handle, and even the gear and brake pedals are interchanged! Not a very good thing to hit one when you need the other ... especially when "off-the-road" could mean 1 km down in the valley! We finally realised that we did need Enfields because of the carriers they come with. With the amount of baggage we had, there was no way we could manage on the puny Yamaha 100cc bikes!

We were looking for Anu Automobiles in Old Manali, but ran into Shankar garage, a place accross the river on the road to Leh. They offered a good deal on the bikes, and assured us about the condition of the bikes. We ended up picking up 2 enfields to try out and see if we were comfortable riding it. It's a great bike once you get the hang of it. Extremely stable and very powerful.
We spent some time testing the bikes, and thought we liked them. So we decided to go ahead and also take 2 yamahas for those who did not want to ride enfields. The plan was to pick up the bikes (freshly serviced) and leave early the next morning.
Other stuff we picked up to prepare for our ride included gloves, plastic bags to put the baggage in, maggi, biscuits and chocolates for food, plastic sheets for raincoats and extra nylon cord to secure the luggage to the bikes.

We spent the rest of the evening walking around town, buying stuff, eating momos in the local market (Zaheer insisting on a particular momo-maker of the fairer sex), having Old Monk in the hotel room, and having dinner at Khyber (again!).

Early (which is around 11:00 AM!!!) the next morning, we checked out of our hotel rooms, made more last minute arrangements, and got down to tying the luggage onto the bikes. We were halfway through this exercise before realising that we still had a problem - There would be 2 pillion riders and again, not enough place to load all the luggage! So we went back to the garage to get another Enfield, which we were told would only be available morning the next day! Off came the luggage again (With all the tying/untying, I did remember Mr.Aldo and Mrs.Ramachandran, my scout teachers in school!), back into the same rooms which we had vacated a couple of hours back.
After a late lunch, we arranged for the plastic cans to carry extra petrol (The last petrol bunk before Leh is at Tandi, which leaves a 365 km stretch with no petrol available ... ) and a small gas burner and vessel for cooking at camp. A visit to the nature park followed. Finally, we got ourselves Old Monk and some sewage-water-packaged-as-apple-wine (for Chavan, the wine-drinking teetotaller), and got down to business. Was a nice evening in the balcony followed up by a good dinner served at the hotel.

Early the next day, we picked up the last bike, got the luggage on, fuelled up, last minute adjustments on the bike, and hit the road to Leh. Adventure was the idea behind this trip, but we had not expected what was to follow ...