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Manali
Another destination we travelled to while in India was Manali. Manali is a hill-station town in the Himalayas. Hill-stations is a word used to describe a town that no one really lives in permanently, but that serves as a vacation or holiday site for most people. To get to Manali, we took a charter bus all the way from New Delhi, constituting a 14-hour bus ride. Something to note about the buses is that they will not always stop at an indoor rest stop. After that, there were no indoor rest stops. Granted, there are other ways to travel to the Himalayas, like paying for a chauffeur that will stop whenever you ask them to. Bus is the most affordable way to travel, though. This page will discuss our stay and activities in Manali, which were undoubtedly worth the long and nauseating bus ride.
Click here to read about to site-seeing in and around Manali.
The Stay & The Food:
Upon arriving at Manali, we arrived before our scheduled hotel check-in time, planning to place our baggage in the holding room of the hotel and then going to get something to eat. However, while checking with the hotel desk person, the manager came out, understanding that we had been on a bus all night, and deciding to let us into our room immediately (since it was also freezing outside). We were staying at the Hotel Kunzam, a Himachal Pradesh Tourism Development Corporation (HPTDC) hotel, which costed around 2,700 Rupees per night, and breakfast buffet was included. One thing that I learned about hotels while I was over there was that room service is considerably cheaper than it is in hotels in America, so we requested warm water and chai (spiced tea) every morning. After settling in the hotel, we wandered across the street to Mount View Noodles for some Tibetan cuisine. Sadly, the link to the restaurant's webpage is broken, so I cannot provide it. Manali is located in the Indian state of Himachal Pradesh near the northern end of the Kullu Valley in the Beas River Valley, and like any other Himachal Pradesh hill stations, Manali has Buddhist cultural influence.
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After settling in the hotel, we wandered across the street to Mount View Noodles for some Tibetan cuisine. The owner of this restaurant gets fresh trout every alternate day from the Beas river. We indulged in some of the Tibetan delicacies such as the Gyathuk (noodle soup with different kinds of meat, which originated in the eastern part of Tibet), Rhechoutse (kind of a dumpling soup), Thenthuk (hand-pulled noodle soup with meat), and grilled Trout served with fries and steamed veggies. Apart from these tibetan delicacies, we also ate traditional Himachal Palao, Goat curry, Bhatura (fluffy deep-fried leavened flour bread) and chickpea curry. The Bhatura at our hotel was abnormally large.
Site-seeing & Itinerary Recommendations
We took an auto rickshaw up the mountain to see one of the Hindu temples. While looking at the temple, there were older women walking around charging people to hold albino rabbits. The belief is that holding the rabbit will bring good luck. One of these women approached me, and as I love most animals, I agreed.
The day after, we hiked further up the same mountain, aiming to make it to the top of a waterfall. However, we only got to the base of the water fall before the sun started setting, forcing us to turn back. The scenery, however, was worth the hike. On the way back, we stopped by a small hut to eat Maggi Instant Noodles, a favorite of my significant other, and a pretty good quick option for a cold day (which it was). It was the festive season so, upon returning, some of the women from one of the mountain village tribes had gathered, wearing traditional clothing, and were performing a folksong and dance.
On our last day in Manali, we went to Solang Valley, one of the places best known in India for snow and skiing. While there, my partner, who had been before, was rather disappointed by the amount of trash and litter that he saw lining the valley, claiming that residents of the hill stations used to be more careful about litter. While there, we opted to ride a pony to the base of the valley (since the valley was quite a way away after getting out of the cab). I also saw that there was the option to ride a yak (and I had never seen a yak before, so I thought it was fascinating to see one). After looking at the valley and taking a couple of photos, we decided to go back to the hotel, due to a blizzard and extreme coldness. In fact, many of the other nearby destinations that we wished to see, such as Gulaba, the Zoo, Rohtang Pass (all of which are higher than 4,000 meters above sea-level) were inaccessible because of heavy snowfall and ice.