INDIA: MANALI

Early mornings are okay when you're going on an adventure. Ready to board. Clouds above Thailand. A quick snap in the hotel in Delhi. Checking out Old Manali. Exploring the forest. Looking up at the roof. A snap of my outfit - rugged up. Sunrise in the hills. Sitting, pondering, enjoying. A snap from the balcony. A rainy grey day in Manali. Rugging up for minus twenty degrees. Directions. Icicles on the hotel balcony. Hopping into bed under four blankets. Exploring the hills in Manali. A star jump. Checking out an old temple. And chilling in the snow.

I'm sure that most of you know that I've recently returned from a three month adventure (I love calling it an adventure!) in India. I really want to share my experiences here and I thought that the best way to do that would be to write a post for each places we visited.

We flew into Delhi, but only stayed for long enough to get our bearings and to book a bus to Manali. Manali is a hill station in the Himachal Pradesh. In summer Old Manali is packed with backpackers enjoying warm summer nights, and in winter it's cold. We arrived towards the end of January and the day before we arrived it had snowed a crazy amount. Of course, coming from the hot Australian summer we wanted to chill out and explore the mountains in the snow. We took an overnight bus from Dehli - my first ever overnight bus - left at around six in the evening and got us to Manali early the next morning for R800. And when I say that it got us to Manali, I mean that the bus stopped around 20kms from Manali and we were told that due to the road condition after the recent snowfall, we'd have to go the rest of the distance by jeep. And of course this was going to cost us extra! When we got to the town we found it was almost a ghost town. There were very few people around, and lots of the shops and restaurants were closed - Old Manali was completely closed and cars were completely snowed in! We had a look around - I only slipped on the ice twice which is an achievement considering I was carrying my backpack - and decided on Hotel Hilltop which, as the name suggests, was on a hill and had an amazing view of the mountains. We rugged ourselves up and went to check out a temple in the mountains, watched some 'skiing', and slid our way down a hill into Old Manali. Literally. I slid down a hill. Squealing. Unfortunately while we were in Manali my travel buddy unluckily found himself, uh, a bit sick. I knew before I left on this trip that one of  us, or both of us, would get sick. But when it happens, if freaks you out. For the next few days I ate bananas and nothing else for fear of becoming sick myself. But after a few days rest - where I sat on the balcony, rugged up, with my kindle, eating bananas and chocolate biscuits - he was feeling better and we decided that we'd enjoyed Manali but wanted to keep moving. We got up really early the next morning and hopped on a local bus bound for McLeod Ganj.

Rebecca.