13/10 – A taxi for the day

6am alarm, and 6:30 shower, by 7am we were by the taxi ready to tackle our journey to the Kullu Valley, with soaking wet laundry… (the bad weather did not allow our clothes to try in time). Our driver was nice but did not speak a lot of English…

From 7 to 11:45am the road was not great, luckily I had taken a tablet for motion sickness, but still I was not a happy bunny… On route we stopped next to a zoom, where we could see 4 black bears wrestling playfully.

Around 12pm we arrived at Rewalsar, it is a town with a holy lake. We took 1.30 minute break, enough time to recover from the road, go around the lake and have lunch. The village around the lake is full of various funny shaped and coloured temples. The most imposing one was the one at the top of a hill, with a huge gold statue.

feeding the fish and greedy monkeys

temples and statues

around  the lake

Rewalsar lake

giant golden statue

nice environmental sign

spying on a child monk and his puppy over lunch

We were back in the car by half-one, the drive down from Rewalsar to Mandy was a  bit hard but after that it was a pretty good road, flat, tarmacked, not too many turns! We were finally in the Valley of Kullu! Unfortunately, we could not enjoy its beauty because of the constant fog that persisted since McLeodGanj… It was such a shame because the road was supposed to be fantastic as we were driving on the boarder of the Great Himalayan National Park Conservation Area (which is a UNESCO World Heritage Site).

We followed a river, crossed a few villages, passed on a dam… We snapped a few pics from the window but we were driving quite fast. We crossed for nearly 1h the town of Kullu (or maybe it was a collection of villages just before Kullu, but we could not see any separations.) We arrived in maintown Kullu around 4:30pm. Our driver dropped us in a street and left. Went in one hotel who told us there were either closed or full. Back in the street, road tired with our backpacked, in a city we did not know, we were looking for a place to stay.

Luckily a policeman called someone (a friend of his?) and found us a place to stay for a low price. He gave us some direction and off we were. We arrived in the Shobla International Hotel. With a name like that we were full of hope, but surprisingly the English spoken by the staff was pretty bad. But we manage to argue our case and got a good price, (but less than what the policeman told us).

Pretty tired by the car journey, we decided to have an easy end of day. Next to the hotel is a cinema, we inquired about the movies (we want to experience a Bollywood before leaving the country) but they only had movies in Indian with not subtitles (we thought we could have more luck in a big city). And next to the hotel was a Domino Pizza.

Feeling lazy, tired and maybe a bit homesick, Damien ordered a Salami Chicken Pizza. It turned out to be a pizza with round pieces of chicken (like salami slices, but no salami was ever involved in the making of our pizza!). We felt a bit bad, eating Western in India, but we were too weak to think too much about it! After that it was early bed and a long night of sleep.

Slept in a double bed in Shobla International Hotel in Kullu.