Manali is a quaint little town surrounded by snowcapped mountains with a river running noisily through it. The mountain sides are covered with pine trees. A few houses and hotels populate the sides of the mountain. A few vehicles run along the narrow roads that wind between the trees and buildings. Patches of snow can be seen all along the way. These patches are not large as we are in May now and the sun is out in full strength. By full strength, I don’t mean the strength that the sun shows in Chennai, but the mild strength that lets the ice from the winter to live without melting for a few days. All in all, Manali is a picture perfect town that lay hidden in the mountains.
This was my vision of Manali before I got there. Sadly, Manali did not turn out to be anything like this.
We travelled to Manali on a Volvo bus through terrible roads. Close to Manali, the roads got better. The road from Kulu to Manali was a four lane highway that ran by the river Beas. The two lanes towards Manali were choked with vehicles. Many Volvo buses and cars headed towards Manali. When we reached the Volvo bus stand, we saw that it contained around 50 buses in it. If each bus had transported about 30 people, 1500 people had already reached Manali that morning. Many more would have reached Manali in cars too. This gave us an idea of the number of tourists in Manali on that summer morning. This also gave us an understanding of the number of the hotels in Manali. There was nothing quaint and little about the real Manali.
The hotel we booked in was a kilometre away from the Volvo bus stand. This meant that it was about a kilometre and a half away from the city centre, The Mall Road. The cab from the hotel, travelled away from the town. To our left was the river and the right side was hilly. At one point, the cab took a right towards the hilly side. Two roads ran up the hill at that point. The one to the left went to the villages. The cab driver informed us that the education minister in the current Himachal cabinet came from one of the villages. He also mentioned that the fellow had not done anything good for his constituency and will not be elected in the next election. We took the lane to the right. The lane was narrow and went up steep. As the cab continued its journey, we realized that we were surrounded by many hotels. The driver informed us that the right side of the hill only had hotels. He continued that too many tourists came to Manali and as a result Manali had the largest concentration of hotels for a place in Asia. We did not verify the veracity of the statement but our experience during the next few days has made us believe this statement.
Our room at the hotel had a reasonable view through its large windows. We looked uphill through an apple orchard. A few hotels could be seen towards the top of the hill. The room was large, and we felt comfortable in it. While having lunch that morning, a couple of women came around selling cherries from the hotel’s orchard. We got a small cardboard box full of fresh cherries for a hundred rupees. I had an odd relationship with cherries. For a long time, I believed that the sugar syrup soaked bright red spheres that one got atop cakes and ice creams were cherries. Then sometime during the 90’s the concept of pastry entered my life. It took me a few years to realize that pastry and cake are different. The pastries usually had a light red sphere atop them, and these, I was told, were cherries. The bright red spheres atop the cakes from my younger agree were not cherries but sugary crap. But I did not agree, the spheres were not sweet. Worse, I thought they were tasteless. So, I did not enjoy eating them. The cherries that we bought from the women seemed different. These looked fresh and invitingly red. I tasted the cherries and found that they were tangy and sweet. I loved its taste and immediately gobbled a few of them.
A growing number of tourists have started dreading the phrase ‘local sightseeing’. In English, the phrase translates to ‘bull shit’. Every tourist location usually has inside its limits a set of uninteresting places that various tourism websites and cab drivers glorify. Every tourist who visits the place do not have a choice but visit such locations else someone will ask them condescendingly “what you did not visit the temple dedicated to cousin of moon’s grandmother’s niece? It is such a beautiful temple surrounded by trees and a calm lake. You missed it” when they get back home. This will give rise to a feeling misery to the tourist, every time he or she thinks of the amount of money spent on the trip. To avoid such a situation, we decided to go for the ‘local sightseeing’ trip of Manali. We started off with the Vasisht Temple. Information on this temple, is available in a million websites on the internet and so I will not repeat it here. The Ram temple had an old stone structure which was partially enveloped within a wooden structure. There were two more structure made of wood too. All the structures looked handsome. We did not spend a lot of time there as it was crowded. One of the things we observed in this trip was that almost no one wears mask in north India. In Chennai at least a few people wear masks. Here across towns and cities, we have seen people going about their lives in the open without masks. Covid is done and dusted for the people here. As the trip proceeded our own usage of mask reduced. Hope we come out this well.
All through the trip, we found good looking dogs in the streets of the different towns in Himachal. They were all big and furry. Usually, they maintained a calm countenance and went about their business without bothering or being bothered by others. At the Vasisht temple, we found one such dog sleeping outside a shop. Behind the dog was a pile of Parle-G biscuits. When the dog woke up, it walked away without even looking at the pile.
Manali has many hot springs. There was one by Vasisht temple. Later, we saw one by the river Beas. Though this is right by the river, it’s water is hot, and the river water is cold. The driver of our cab mentioned that this hot spring gets submerged by the river during the rains. The hot springs are popular locations for tourists for they are supposed be of medicinal nature and it is believed it cures the bather of many ailments. Looking at the number of people in these hot springs we wondered if we would end up getting for ailments if we shared the spring with them. So, we did not jump into any of the hot springs.
The next stop of the ‘local sightseeing’ trip was the Hidamba temple. The background behind this temple is an interesting one. Hidamba was one of Bhima’s wives. She is the mother of Ghatotkacha who helped the Pandavas in their war against the Kauravas. I find Ghatotkacha interesting due to the movie ‘Maya Bazaar’. S V Ranga Rao played the character of Ghatotkacha in the movie and the unforgettable ‘Kalyana Samayal Saadham is pictured on him. Hidamba is associated with Manali and so she the temple dedicated to her in this place. I had seen the pictures of the temple and found it to be interesting. The path to the temple was packed with cars. This is a narrow street that can fit a maximum of 10 people walking abreast but, on that day, there were cars going in both directions and people using the lane too. It took us an hour to cover the four kilometres from the Vasisht temple to the Hidamba temple. Half a kilometre from the temple, the driver got annoyed and asked us to get down and walk the remaining distance. We managed to walk through the mass of unmasked souls and reach the temple. Besides the people walking towards and away from the temple there were also hawkers selling us everything that we did not need. If we took a moment to rest, people tried to sell us herbal medicines that strengthened our bones. Others tried to sell us genuine saffron. We shook our heads and walked towards the temple. That day was considered the birthday of Hidamba and there was a special festival in the temple. So, there were hundreds of people waiting in line to get into the temple. We did not intend to wait with them and so we went around the outsides of the temple and went back to the car.
Next, he took us someplace called the club house. Once again, we inched through the traffic at snail’s pace. The traffic was ridiculously dense, and we were getting impatient. We had reached Manali after spending a sleepless night and being stuck in the traffic seemed much worse than being stuck in a north Indian wedding reception where the DJ, to prove his lousy taste in music, plays music at one hundred thousand seven hundred and sixty seven decibels. We inquired to the driver about the attractions in the club house. He came up with a vague list of activities, like river view, zip line over the river, shopping and café. None of the options seemed exciting but we had no choice but to go ahead as turning around in the traffic seemed impossible. At some point, the driver got frustrated and requested us to get down and walk the remaining distance. We happily got off the car and started walking towards the gates of clubhouse. A few metres from the gate we saw a board with the name ‘Hotel Tirupati’ on it. We went in and sat on the deck by the river. Behind us several tourists were taking rides on zip lines. They were hooked to the zip line and then pulled (or pushed, I am not sure which) to the centre of the zipline. Then, the zipline-wallah tugged at the zipline and the person in the centre went up and down. The whole idea was to get the person’s feet to touch the river water. If the person was short or a child, he or she was too far above the water and the attempt to wet the feet went unsuccessful. In one case, the husband of a newly married couple, started filming his wife as she went up and down at the centre of the zipline. The wife did not want to wet her feet and so held it high. The husband asked her to let her feet down, but she continued to hold her legs high. After a few minutes, the husband said “kya bekaar hain yaar” and stopped filming.
I can’t remember much of food we had at ‘Hotel Tirupati’ but much to our surprise the idlis, chutney and sambhar tasted good. The sambhar tasted more like pulingari. We got out of the restaurant at around 7 PM. It was too late to go the clubhouse, which did not sound like a very exciting place anyway and so we decided to get back to the hotel. The next day, we had to wake up early for we were going to the Rohthang pass. It was our only chance to see ice during the trip and we were very excited.
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