Hell of a day....started with a late waking call at 10AM ... had class but no interest in making my name fill up the attendance sheets of my profs today... maybe the last three yrs of undergrad classes had made me seasoned to the possible repercussions of not making to the classes..
lying back and having absolutely no job to be done, i opened my computer to fall into that magical world i love to travel to.., making a bucket list before i kick the same :D
haah.. i was browsing through the pictures which i took during the first and last tour that we had from the college... curiously i came across a photo that struck me in my cerebral somewhere...

i had to search where i read this place....somewhere recently...something ominous...
yes my fear had been true

                       

let me start by paying homage to our brethren who left this planet in the flash floods last week



there was something that i kept wondering while i was up there "touring" last October... all i could find was my friends taking photographs... and i seriously am a person who does not take fancy in being photographed... (maybe cus i'm unattractive in many terms :D) ... i made up a plan when  completed my tour..to get to my sweet spot in life.......i knew i had the thing for travelling......but i had to add something to my passion "alone"....the sweet spot of my life was to travel... alone... i hated travelling in packs.. if there's anyione around who thinks alike me...lemme say once you're into 20's its high time.....the gpa's the companies headhunting you.,,, our families counting upon us to travel in that regular express train GPA-FAMILY LIFE SF Express via-PLACEMENTS-JOBS-MATRIMONIAL SITES-MARRIAGE-KIDS... completing the travel asap ..

i am on the ground plans of making a quick exit route... preparing a bucket list is one that i had done..
if anyone reading this is not interested in travelling to find what life is, pls refrain yourselves from this line

Since we may not be able to afford to get an Enfield 500 and its subsequent costs of spending our hard-clinched INR on fuel and maintenance.. we may use the belts of india .. the great indian railway to pick on from where we plan to start ... the best place to start a long journey is to start from an end..so why not visit the CAPE as a part to begin the journey?


                                 

haah  more than half the job is done if we decide when and where to start the journey.... now the next problem arises...isnt that usual? one problem subsides and the next one springs right onto our face? WHERE TO GO?
i suppose that should be left to the person .. go to a place that suits you..but for me the travel is never complete without finding the expanse of our country... yah... Ladakh i guess,,,, the cold desrt is what i would like to see at the end ... a place of interest to the Chinese and the Pakistanis alike... what makes it peculiar ? i'm curious ..
but heading straightaway to kashmir is like....yeah it kills the spirit out of it... what about seeing the way culture unwinds itself? why not see the unknown? to watch the corridors of various 'swamy' and 'devi' temples of the south? the hoysala sculptures in Canara? the buddhist shrine in sravanabelagola the coffee plantations in chikamagalur...yeah if i take a Himsagar express straightaway the whole essence would be lost so yes break-a-break-a-break the journey...  :)


<------hoysala sculptures in karnataka

CHIKAMAGALUR COFFEE PLANTNS

(PS: i seriously dont know that girl.. it was just to make you sit upright and be more keen in reading this blog :) no harm intended )

you know what , the life of people is something what we miss out when we are tourists.. what we do is to be herded like cattle through the places by people called "tour-guides" ( should call them tourist-herds")
we should walk through the inroads talk to the locals make amicable conversations with them...the impression they would leave in our hearts is something priceless, and that too comes free of cost (advantage 2 :) )...we could find that happiness and sharing does not come with a piggybacking of money..

One thing everyone has to keep in mind while travelling is a golden rule that comes with a ratio 2:1:1
2 for accomodation 1 for travel and 1 for food.. something by which we should divide the money for a day ...this 2 can be avoided if we could network with our long lost friends who are working/studying in places scattered across india...we could atleast find a use with FB  by networking with our friend-of-our-friends vis-a-vis....atleast we could now get what "mutual friends " in facebook are for...

For travel always accord to the cheapest and not comfortable one..else you'd slowly be comfortable and kill all the money through it...travel second class,, get the life of the country... hear what our fellow passenger speaks in his language and try to figure it out ..learning could als be fun :)

travelling never really should have a fixed end...i guess my ladakh idea is something trivial too..
but i shall make the best out of all i have..
travelling through villages of kerala TN krnataka andhra (oops...telengana and andhra ..) maharashtra we could see hoew the life transforms.. the climate changes.. the attire.. the language... oh my , the british might have had a heck of a job unifying the country... :3 :D

haha... a billion people... a zillion cultures...


making my route into cities... i realise how does a country, where a quarter of the population who does not know even to write his/her name and a country where poverty rules and is two decades behind the world become a country with third largest gdp .. producn plants automobile industry, software outsourcing has made our country to rise to the front ... we'd be proud , when in an indian city to say that we belong to this country

but is that the end of a fairytale of an indian city?? i hope not..

i hope this pic reveals more than what has been told over and over and over
travelling alone makes our mind liberated.. an impetus of knowing more is conceived from a thrust to explore more..


i would love to disembark from the rickety-rackety train ride for a ride along the first expressway in the country :) the Vadodara-Ahmedabad Expressway or the NE-1.. its true that only wider roads could bring greater developments... my pranaam to the modi sarkar ..

if given a chance i would never miss the sights of rajasthan and yes further moving in a second class rake in NW railway second class passenger rake i would probably get down at our indraprastha... the capital of our country... the city through which the outside sees our inside..from second millenium BC to now... this place has always attracted human attention...

(apologies for this image is straight from the Wiki)

tthe above shown are the places everyone....everyone goes to in delhi ...instead why dont we try something new and hear what history has to tell us? there are a lot of places that goes unexplored in delhi including the talakotra garden , the tomb of ghiazuddin tughlak ... make sure nobody misses the dillihaat ...its a place where we could get the cuisines of all the major states in india.. just like te sages say, bathing in ganga is alike doing tapasya for yrs... i think this is the same... an auto-ride , and you are welcomed by the spice palette of india)..
 
time to say goodbye to delhi (thanks to the rocketing prices for food and accomodation , better stay at the residence of that relative everyone has in delhi who has a sarkar job)

time to say goodbye to the trains for a while... i plan to take a seasonal bus service route to ladakh from delhi via kullu and manali...costs around 2.5k one side including food and accomodation at kyelang , off manali at night ...takes about 40 hours i hear
i go to ISBTand take the early morning bus to manali.. my first stop in the HRTC bus...the route cuts through the rural Haryana with beautiful Haryanvi girls on the roadsides ,only to be competing with the Punjabi girls i'd meet when i'd cross thestate border punjab is a distinct place   once, punjab consisted of a region extending from as west as kandahar and as east as purvanchal. after partition the lion's share went to Pakistan and the indian side was split into Punjab, Haryana, and HP basd on topography and religion

after having lunch from A roadside dhaba, the bus would cruise into the Himachal the foot of the great himalayas,, where sanctity meets adventure.... where the height meets humbleness..

the bus is going to travel some of the most treacherous routes seen in the planet.. the place where the BRO (yeah right, they could be called BRO ..Border Rads Organisation.,,) has toiled their last half a century making it viable for passenger travel...


alas reaching manali is a relief... the bus would halt for a few hours where we could make our numb buttocks "un-numb" ,, can take a while cus the temperature is not ur best friend anymore

this is what manali looks like when in winter, they say...
but this is what it looked like when i visited there last october

:3 :3 :3 :3

bad luck for me...
ah never mind the travel is coming to an end in a few hours,,, i would not have bothered more, or less anything... i get into the bus and the bus takes through the Rohtang Pass, Gramphoo to reach Kyelang that night

the stay at there for the night could be daunting taking into effect the time we travell...early morning 5am the bus leaves for LEH, the cpital of ladakh,,, i'd be only happy to reach the land for the fact that i would have been travelling for nearly a month and my brains would be buzzing sans oxygen,,,


the journey alas comes to an ending that has no limitations... i even think of sneaking through the LaC (line of actual control) into aksai chin region that india owns but is administered by the chinese..but i have no surety i could come back home unless i'm in a coffin..(maybe when i'm senile i could try that too) ... the last signal post that came across was not actually something that gave a signal ,,.. but something that gave me a smile on my weary face



my journey could not be meaningful if i cannotknow the feelings and aspirations and hopes and plights and happiness and...and and goes on..
yes , what may be the diversities what may be the lifestyles what may be the languagee, cast or creed... the sense of belonging to  a proud nation augments it all :)
maybe i can bore you with another dream-travelogue of mine...
take care
jai hind :)