Date : 19th July, 2015
Never imagined that it would take so much of time to assemble the bikes and segregate the needy stuffs on to each of the panniers. It's 0100 AM and we just finished the final preparation for the next few days. Negative energy every time tried pulling us from our path to the big expedition. Nothing really went well, after we left Bangalore. No one to blame; sometime it was the system, sometime it was who work for the system and more over sometime it was us.
Start of the day
shippr.in driver phone was not reachable, who had promised to pick us by 0530 AM. Now we were short of 2 things, Vijesh and a vehicle to ship our bicycles to airport. Time was running out and no back up plan. We started hunting someone who can drop us at airport in the roads. Vijesh was definitely late, but he had managed to arrange a carrier [mini Ace] to Airport. Though it costed INR 2500, its was the need of time and we didn't bother much. It was 0630 AM, when we loaded all our luggage and bicycle boxes to the vehicle. Yes in this rush of last hour we forgot one of the pannier of Santhosh, and had to drive back a bit to pick it. With little lesser morning Bangalore traffic, we managed to reach airport by 0800 AM. Before getting inside the airport, we just checked the weight of our boxes and rearranged our luggage a bit among the checkin and cabin luggage's. To our surpise, a bicycle [14 KG], a 3 men tent [4.7 KG] and bicyle box alone came to around 25 KGS.
Big discussion on the rules and regulation for taking cycles in flight killed lot of our time at airport and we ended up paying extra INR 1000 for each of the boxes as handling charges, though we had purchased 10 KG extra luggage @ INR 1750 each . Boarding passes were collected from the counter and in no time everyone heard our names in the final call list. I don't know how we cleared the security check; thanks for the people and the security personals and Vijesh. It was the first time I was running in side the airport to catch the flight, where on the other side it was quite regular for Vijesh. The air hostess recieved us with a greeting smile, ending with "Sir, can you also please close the door too".
Long breath and glass of water made us normal after that long run and we found Vijesh left his jacket at the security. In four hours time the flight reached Chandigarh and we were quite unhappy to see the way
indigo.in mishandled the bicycles. In spite of all those warning labels on the box, it came on the conveyor belt laid flat. That moment we all had only one question in our mind "what would have happened to our disk brake and derailleurs?". We had an unfruitful long argument with IndiGo and the final conclusion was they take extra money for the box to be in order; they are not responsible for the stuffs inside. They don't even read the instructions on the box. No one to complain, no one to blame; we just have to live with our luck in this country.
Outside the Airport one of Santhosh's friend received us. From the Airport, we booked three auto rickshaws to drop us at sector 43 bus stop. Its just opposite to this Bus Stand, Near HP Petrol bunk, all the buses to Manali will stop by to pick up passengers. We placed our luggage inside the cloak room and left out for shopping. Right after settling down our stomach, we headed towards a market complex and completed purchasing final check list. We had our bus only @ 2300 HRS and we decided to head towards Sukhna Lake. It was good time spent with a nice peddled boat ride. On the way back we tasted our enzymes with some delicious food at Pal Dhaba. I would never miss to say that the mutton rogan josh and butter chicken were at their best.
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| Shukhna Lake |
We spent an extra two hours at the bus stop waiting for our bus to come and when finally the bus came at 0130 AM , it wasn't smooth for us to board the bus. We had a chat earlier with HimalayanVolvo Travels about carrying the bicycles while booking the tickets, but the bus driver wanted us to pay extra INR 1500 for each bicycle. Big fight, phone calls and lot of heated discussions almost made us to give up. Finally some how we convinced the driver to board our bicycles with a cost of INR 500 each.
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