India&south-east-Asia

In Dharamshala Umes and a friend joined us, and after spending one more day there we decided to go on to manali (also located in mountains, about 250Km away).
Manali is very beautiful, located between big mountains by the riverside; forests and a lot of green all around, and also nice hot springs in a temple nearby... fruit trees everywhere, chill-out bars, lots of tourists playing guitar, didgeridoo, drums and other instruments. We stayed 3 days there, and in this time I finished my didgeridoo, made out of bamboo because it's very easy to make the hole through, and the sound is not the best but OK for a thing made in few hours and for practising.
The owners of the guest house where we were staying cheated on us charging more than they first said, so we didn’t want to stay there any longer . Beem and Wishal went back to Dharamshala because of some girls they liked.... and Umesh and me we went on towards a Tibetan monastery to visit some monks friends of Umesh.
We chose not to take the highway ( in india the highways are often worse than the small roads, with lots of holes, dust, too much traffic, mud instead we went on a very small road in mostly good conditions with beautiful landscapes and no traffic. After a while driving we stopped to ask for the way, and the family where we asked invited us for a chai, they gave us fresh apples and kakis and were very nice to us.
We spent the night at the pass on top of the mountains at more than 3000m high; there were 4 houses and one temple, no water and no electricity..... A man gave us a humid, bad smelling room with a shitting place in front of the door for 100Rps (what is quite expensive), and our only option was or to take it or to sleep outside in fog and rain... But we survived the night and went on early morning. Then who had to take the highway again, and it was the worst road that both Umesh and me had ever seen, and that means a lot; it was full of big holes sometimes like 30cm deep, mud or dust everywhere, too much traffic (where we with the bike had much better journey than with any car) and some landslides too. ,...);
Same day, it was raining and getting dark; we stopped by a man to ask for the way, he tells us that next town is 2.5 hours away.... so we see a bus stand (dirty and wet) and we ask if we can sleep in there. He offers us to stay to sleep in his place (a 3x5 meter garage), and we accepted gratefully. When he turns on the light we see that the garage is already overfilled with sleeping people... but we still found a square meter to sleep too. Next morning (it was still raining heavily), after some hours talking and having breakfast (they didn’t have much but they offered everything they had) we wanted to start riding, but we realised that we had a pincher in the front wheel and instead of riding we had to start pushing.
So after 4 kilometres pushing and with the pincher fixed, we went on heading the monastery; we had to cross 5 big landslides, some not big but with deep watery mud (pushing the bike through with mud up to our knees), other huge mountains of earth, stones, trees and big rocks; we carried the bike through and over all this, sometimes with help from other bikers but mostly alone. It was a very big adventure with great effort, but after doing something like that you know what you’ve done and you can be proud of it, and you see that nearly nothing is impossible.
After a very long time riding over all this and adding some rivers in the mountains close to the monastery; we finally arrived in fog and darkness at the budhist monastery. Everything was dark, no light, no voices or other sounds around us, and we had to walk around calling for somebody for quite a while until a boy with a candle came, and without a word he guided us to Tempa, Umesh’s friend, who welcomed us and showed us our room where we slept till late next morning.
Because of big landslides after heavy rain there was no running water nor electricity at the monastery or in town, so the monks had to go every day with the car to bring water for cooking and the most needed. Once of these times they lost the car keys, and just for fun I tried with mu bike keys and whoopsaaa!!!! That car worked perfectly those....!!!!
Another day we went with some of the monks to a nearby *town* with 5 houses and a chai shop where we sat for a while and enjoyed the beautiful view around us. We went back sitting on top of a bus, we and at least 20 people more singing, laughing and having fun while the bus brought us flying over that very small mountain road back to the monastery.
We also had to wash clothes, but without water it’s not easy, so another monk and me went on my bike to a river nearby with two buckets and a lot of clothes to wash.


TO BE CONTINUED....... ONCE i GET TIME AND GOOD INTERMET MY FRIENDS.

JUST NOW I'M ON MY WAY TO KHAJURAHO, VARANASSI AND NEPAL.... HUGHS AND KISSES!!!!!!!!
GERY