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Saturday, July 09, 2005

Keylong - III

When we stopped at Koksar for breakfast I met another guy, Amol who was going to Leh in that bus. He is a software professional working in Patni Computers. He, as well as the conductor told us to join them to Leh as Leh is a beautiful place. I have also seen lots of pictures of Leh and I am also quite keen to go to Leh, but not this time. We had only 5 days and if we go to Leh, another two days will be gone in travel! So, for this time, we decided to stick to Keylong.

Bus started at 10am from Koksar. We reached Keylong by 12:30pm. My friends had told me that all the hotels are in the 'Mall', which is slightly below the highway. We went down and checked into 'Tashi Deleg' hotel. The room was okay, ventilation was a bit less, but manageable. We took a hot shower and came out to have lunch. Went up again and had lunch at a dhaba. Subha had dal-rice and I had mutton Mo-Mo. Mutton is covered with floured rice and boiled. That is mutton mo-mo. After the food, we just walked around enjoying the scenic beauty.

Keylong is the head-quarters of Lahaul&Spiti, a district in Himachal Pradesh, located at a height of 3340m from sea level. It's a small town, probably spread on the two sides of a one kilometer road. It's not a big tourist attraction, but tourists do come there. It is surrounded by high peaks, probably of height around 3500-3700m. At this time of the year, the peaks have some amount of snow, some peaks being fully covered with snow. We just walked around to get acclimatized. We came back to the hotel and rested for a while, went up again to see the evening sun's paintings on the snow capped mountains. After looking around for sometime, we found a nice place to get a nice view of the mountains. It was really nice to see the way colours get changed on snow capped mountains in the evening. Bright white to off-white to light yellow to golden to light orange. It was really exotic.

After the sunset, we went back to the hotel. Reaching the hotel, we wanted to plan for the next day. I had xeroxed few pages from 'Lonely Planet' of Manali and Keylong, but forgot to put them into the bag!!! So, we had no option than asking others for help. When we asked the receptionist, he asked us to contact the owner of the hotel. His name is Tashi. When we approached him, he was very happy to help us out. He showed us 'Kardang Monastery' situated in the hill right across the Bhaga river. After analayzing us and calculating how we would be proceeding etc, he said, it'll take two hours for us to reach the place. We had dinner at the restaurant of this hotel itself. The food there is reasonably good, quantity-wise and quality-wise. Also, it's not very expensive. I had Veg Thukpa and Subha Veg Mo-Mo. Noodles boiled with some vegetables (and sauce, of course) is Thukpa. It was tasty. We later had Thukpa from some other dhabas, but this one was much better.


28-06-05: "Many Many Happy Returns of The Day, Subha". It was Subha's birthday. Didn't have any special celebration. We had celebrated her pirannal (birthday according to the Malayalam calendar) here. We woke up not so early, had breakfast and started the trek by 10am. The route first goes down to cross the river and then goes up. Though the monastery is not very high up than the Keylong town, there is some amount of trek because of the route going down quite a bit. Enjoying the views around, we proceeded slowly. It was probably the first trek of Subha and it was very much clear :) Since I was stopping every now and then to click photos and take videos, she didn't have to tell me to stop many times! One nice thing about treks (in this part or in Sahyadris), you get to see a lot of wild flowers which you generally won't see (in your village too). Here also we got to see a lot such flowers. Cute little blue, yellow, white, and all combined!!! Tashi's calculation was almost precise. We reached the monastery by 12noon.

This monastery is believed to be built in 12th century. But it is renovated recently and actually the process is going on even now. The main priest of this monastery is a great painter. There are some old paintings on the walls of the monastery. In the parts where the old paintings were destroyed, he has painted it very beautifully. Most of these paintings were different stages of Buddha's life. He has painted the roof also. I can't describe the beauty of the paintings here, but believe me, they are just too good.
We had packed some bread, butter, jam, chocolates, banana and dry
fruits for lunch. Had them sitting in a shadow. While we were having lunch, a woman from the village came there. She was going to the monastery to pray. We offered her eatables and she accepted banana. She was complaining that now a days it's quite hot there! We really started laughing hearing this comment, because we were just two days away from 45 degrees. We left after some rest and it took about two hours to reach Keylong. Subha was quite tired by then. She went straight to the bed. After some rest, I decided to take walk and Subha decided to continue resting. I went out and met our hotel owner once again seeking help for the next day's plans. He told us about a place Udaipur and an ancient temple there. He phoned up the HPTC (Himachal Pradesh Transport Corporation) and got details of the bus timings, onwards and return. So, that fixed the programme for the next day, 29th. I had plans to celebrate Subha's birthday with some wine and/or beer in the hotel. We didn't get good wine and Subha didn't agree for beer. So, we just had dinner and finished the day just as usual.

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