Leh at every step of the breathtaking views-Manali highway, long after the images imprints. In the summer, on the road from the Kullu valley, a stream of buses and Enfield motorcycles in the world, most other road Motorable, 5328m Dizzying Heights with a visit to. The very surface, dirt from the glacial streams on the rough cut is different from the Asphalt. Different river basins with a 485-km ride Sarchu camp at night with a height of 4, 000 m on the highway takes about 24 hours for 3 months on July 15 and 15 (between.) every year. Second season, is closed due to snow.

From Manali, the Rohtang pass road (3900m) for at the beginning of a long climb across the Beas. Sewer as you progress in the reform as long as the eternal snow on the idea, Pastures of grass between the coniferous forests. With just under a breakfast stop for Dhabas to close. There is a temple near the top of a rock, from where you get crown of a great view of the upper Beas valley.

Rohtang La (la means ‘Pass’ in Tibet) Lahul and Spiti means for the difficult areas is the entrance. 5000 passed between the two – meter summit, one in the region to have the most treacherous. Sometimes people suddenly fall season were stuck. Rohtang literally “” means the bodies of the funds.

Gleaming white in the Chandra Pal Valley Massif offers exciting insights to the bottom of the slope to Rohtang. The road is where the river reaches Koksar. Parathas I can not forget, we had it. They were Aaloo parathas, stuffed fried, but served with a saucy Tibetan oil. Finger-licking irresistible!

The next few hours were some of the most beautiful in the whole trip. Since the slopes of the valley with the road works, you can see the high peaks and hanging glaciers. Sacred mountains Rangcha a strong shield around the base of the lunar-Tandi on how to bridge on the river after which Keylong Valley Bhaga Bhaga rivers with your guidance, beyond Keylong, the Bhaga valley broadens. All buses in Darcha stop for lunch here only. A roadside Dhaba with a hot cup of Tibetan Thupka is a favorite. This soup is a dish of Chinese noodles. Tibetan sauce complements the taste of the Thupka. We called Momo Tibetan court was like a delicious samosas.

If you Baralacha La, which are Darcha blow your mind, the road towards the mountain of red wine a row and yellow, green, Boulders How to Zingzing on the bar is rising from the ground than it is uninhabited. The “Twelve” three valleys, Bhaga, the moon and the head of the forms to Yunan horned. By the time you get to Sarchu Serai you’ll be ready for a night’s rest, which is in a tent. It’s a high; straight at the bottom tip of the plane is next to the river Bagha. You dhabas-dal some temporary rice for dinner. To 4:30, you have to watch 5lth further to the visit of several layers of warm clothing protection that do not stop trembling with.

You head to Lachlang La (5, 059m) from Sarchu, the second highest pass on the highway, before descending to Pang at 4, 500m. 3 km from Pang is the extraordinary Moray Plains (4, 800m), a 45-kilometre-long plateau encircled by rolling hills and brilliant white Himalayan peaks.

LA Dibring Tanglang on the road, one of the main camps for the climb to 5328m spinning begins. The best in the world and you have to reach it in time, then his nose started bleeding a little can be done. This is a symptom of altitude sickness. (More on that later), but. From here the Himalayan Karakoram Range, Ladakh video signal that you are. The road to our old Indus (Sindhu) valley is. Indus River, for thousands of years is the lifeline of India. It is a world (Indus Valley civilization) in the oldest civilizations fed. It is, of course, think in terms of the big river.

From Manali entrance to Ladakh is Upshi. This is where the Indian Army, which finished construction and for maintenance of the highway project. Strong in view of the Himalayan region cut off a road maintenance is very difficult. As the freezing point of the project is called, is amazing. Read a road board: “If you want a road to the moon, then contact Himank” please. And we have no exaggeration!

(40 km) from Leh Upshi on the way, there’s high peaks with Gompas homes and villages is crowned. The solid stone structures Gompas Buddhist monasteries, but the big temples.

The first impression was that the industry green with patches of the desert teachers. The first things you notice a Carillons prayers are with the tires. As Leh above sea level is 3, 505 meters, the highest degree a tourist experience altitude sickness. The symptoms constant headache, dizziness, drowsiness, and stuffy nose is bleeding, and include / or lack of breath. It is because your body has not yet acclimatized to the comparative lack of oxygen. So the tourism department suggests you take complete rest for at least 48 hours. Since we can not afford such a rest, we were dealing with the 24 hours before breaking out.

Since we are not already booked accommodation, we went to a hotel / guesthouses. Many of them were filled. Half a kilometer before we run, we were tired. Most of the family who did not have any place so that they were sorry women is managed by the guest house, run! A lovely “Julay” (Ladakhi “Hello”), and also welcomed us with tea.

Ladakhi capital of Leh, sprawls from the foot of a ruined Tibetan-style palace – a maze of mud-brick and concrete. Leh, the capital of the state in the seventeenth century, when his farm here Sengge Namgyal Shey, 15 km southeast of the head of the closer – Khardung China in the Karakoram Corridor. (Khardung to bring the world’s highest, 39 kms from Leh) is.

Ladakh is a travelers and trekkers’ paradise. Backpacks come with their foreign, is growing in different directions. The charm and the former Palace and cities Namgyal Gompa Tsemo included around. A little walk in the fields, Shankar Murals ports and a modern tantric deity Avalokitesvara line thousand small monastery. Just within the reach of picturesque villages and wires in Gompas Shey, a seventeenth century abandoned palace, and Tiks Gompa Hemis Gompa is amazing, this area is the largest site. Of a sitting Buddha Tiks is a large statue.

Leh, the power is very bad. Most of the time, including the night, there was no electricity. By our candlelight dinner is a lot to be forced. Through satellite telephone connections, it is very comfortable with the call by India’s hard to connect. Leh after about 8 months of the world for one year is cut, they (such as construction materials, etc.) for 3 months during the season as the most important things will happen. The only consolation is that almost all the air through the year round has been involved. But the villages on Manali – Leh highway remains completely closed for 8-9 months in a year.

Vijay Satija

Feb 2009

http://www.indiastudychannel.com/resources/49948-Road-Trip-from-Manali-Leh-Ladakh.aspx

Average Rating: 4.8 out of 5 based on 288 user reviews.

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An entertainer dressed as Captain Jack Sparrow from Pirates of the Caribbean poses for a photo with an Indian tourist outside the Kodak Theatre in Los Angeles

In India, May is the cruelest month. The short spring is already a distant memory, and the heat- and dust-quelling monsoon rains are still weeks away. There’s no better time for Indians to take to the road.

All told, some 550 million Indians travel to other parts of the country each year. Once school lets out for the summer, many families set off on annual visits to grandparents in their native town or village. Another 12 million Indians choose to fly overseas. Wealthy families from Punjab and Gujarat, in the north and west of India, respectively, flock to cosmopolitan meccas like Switzerland or Dubai, where women can indulge in brand-name shopping and don the revealing, Western-style fashions they don’t dare flaunt back home.

But while more than half a billion Indians take a holiday each year, the appeal of travel has traditionally been less about exploring someplace new than about simply getting out of town. Many Bengali families in the eastern corner of the country, for instance, escape north in the summer to the cooler Himalayas — an unfamiliar land and landscape. But they typically join large tour groups, interacting almost exclusively with other Bengalis and eating only Bengali-style meals.

There is, however, a quickly growing segment of Indian travelers — mostly young, rich and hailing from India’s larger cities — who are decidedly more adventure-seeking. Unlike their parents, they visit uncommon places and pursue unconventional activities — a safari in Tanzania, a ruins tour of Turkey, an F1 race in Singapore — with an interest and curiosity about other cultures that previous generations may not have had.

It is still a small proportion of Indian travelers who are so venturesome — but, by the numbers, even a small proportion qualifies as a mass movement, globally speaking. So it is no surprise that the travel industry has taken note. From New Zealand to Namibia, government tourist boards have designed campaigns specifically to woo Indian travelers, and luxury-tour purveyors like Cox & Kings and Kuoni, both based in Britain, advertise hard for Indian rupees. Kuoni, for instance, has joined hands with fabled Bollywood production house Yash Raj Films to offer the “Enchanted Journey” tour of movie locations, letting travelers ski the Alps or boat on Lake Zurich in the footsteps of their favorite stars.

In February came another nod to the Indian traveler’s increasing clout: international travel-guide leader Lonely Planet launched an Indian version of its eponymous monthly travel magazine (other editions of the magazine are published in the U.K. and Brazil). And in October, the bible of luxury travel, Condé Nast Traveler, has plans to follow with an Indian edition, building on the established successes of the publisher’s Indian versions of Vogue and GQ.

The target readers of the new magazines are Indians who are traveling more and traveling differently — many as singles or couples without children or parents in tow. “You’ll be surprised by how many married women there are traveling without husbands and single women traveling with girlfriends, ” says Sumitra Senapaty, 49, a travel writer who has run Women on Wanderlust, a travel club for women, since 2005 and has watched her business grow many times over. “I quite struggled with it initially, ” she says. “I didn’t have the pocket to advertise, so everybody’s mother, friend, aunt and sister spread the word. I just wanted women to come onboard.” Today, Senapaty’s tours — which usher female travelers to hard-to-reach places like Ladakh, a high mountain desert in the Himalayan foothills — are usually sold out.

In addition to seeking girlfriend globetrotters, the industry is going after the growing number of travelers who embark on longer, activity-driven trips and seek novel experiences, rather than just another jaunt to the hotel pool. More and more, Indian travelers are going deep-sea diving in Australia, for instance, and booking yoga retreats in the Himalayas. “There are more people choosing adventure travel over conventional holidays, ” says Vaibhav Kala, who runs Delhi-based Aquaterra Adventures and arranges trips for more than 3, 000 customers per year. “Since four or five years ago, our clientele has turned on its head. From catering to largely inbound foreign tourists, we’re now catering to mostly Indian travelers.”

But catering to Indian travelers means catering to certain Indian preferences and peculiarities, no matter how far-flung or exotic the vacation. Lonely Planet Magazine India always gives readers the requisite practical information about obtaining visas and finding consulates overseas, but it also has a section called Fancy a Curry? that locates Indian restaurants and vegetarian options in foreign cities. “Indians are getting a bit more adventurous, but we still need a little hand-holding, ” says Vardhan Kondvikar, editor of Lonely Planet Magazine India. “We’re a bit like Nemo right now — the big world outside is very exciting, but we still need the anemones nearby for security.”

The worldview of the Indian traveler strongly influences the editorial choices that the magazine’s staff make, Kondvikar says. For instance, the magazine tends to highlight mainstream tourist destinations — which are perhaps familiar to world-weary travelers but new to the Indian populace. The tone of the magazine is also much more introductory, friendly and informative than that of its British and Brazilian counterparts. Recent feature stories introduced readers to Rome, Vietnam, Los Angeles and Puducherry in peninsular India; another popular article covered five weekend getaways from several major Indian cities. “[The U.K.] magazine was designed for experienced travelers who want to see the unexplored sides of places they’ve already been. So it has a lot of stories that bypass traditional tourist sites and find hidden alleys and restaurants, ” says Kondvikar. “We couldn’t do too much of that — many Indians are only going to the major destinations for the first time, and we didn’t want to ignore them.”

The travel lust of this budding demographic has largely survived the global recession, which has otherwise diminished international travel overall. In fact, a stronger rupee has seen more Indians traveling abroad, especially to long-haul destinations. The U.N.’s Madrid-based World Tourism Organization estimates that by 2020, some 50 million Indians will be taking foreign holidays each year.

So while Lonely Planet and Condé Nast may be wading into a shaky market already cluttered with dozens of travel titles, they have high expectations for success. “[In terms of] advertising revenues, not only have we dominated market share in the categories we operate in but also we are growing at an exponential rate, ” says Alex Kuruvilla, managing director of Condé Nast India. “So we are very bullish on the opportunity.” If the rupee continues to rise, this May might not end up being so cruel after all.

Madhur Singh

2010

http://www.time.com/time/travel/article/0, 31542, 1989633, 00.html

Average Rating: 5 out of 5 based on 174 user reviews.

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