Day 115. Manali - Bilaspur

After another lovely breakfast in the garden we said goodbye to our hosts. The Mary hotel in Manali have treated us very well, nothing was too much trouble.




Leaving Manali.

We are retracing our steps for a couple of days towards Chandigarh before we peel off towards the Nepal border. 

We battled once again today the almost constant roadworks, potholes, traffic, dust, sheep and goats being driven along the road, cows in the most unlikely of places, sometimes just standing nonchalantly in the middle of the road whilst the traffic swerves around them. 





There was also a large construction project going on with all the diggers and machinery to dodge as well. Never a dull moment.



Shed getting moved in amongst the traffic and road construction.

Huge tunnels getting dug our. Road will be amazing when completed. 

We arrived at our infamous tunnel, last night I devised a safety strategy to get in behind a truck and just follow it through. 
As luck would have it we caught one just at the entrance and it must be the cleanest emissions truck in India -yay! It also put on its hazard lights for some reason and set a good pace so there was no danger of us being overtaken. 

We both looked at the tunnel in amazement, and our thoughts about our incident a couple of days ago, were that we were incredibly lucky to have made it. 

We stopped for a drink and a rest about 12:45 and agreed we would ride until 3 and then look for a hotel.
 At about 2:50 we came to a lovely town with a nice hotel and decided that would do.  Only 175km today and 7 hours later, pretty tough going, we are covered in dust and crap from the road and the bike hasn’t looked as bad since the day we entered China but instead of brown muck it is white muck.  





Comments

  1. russellmarie9 September 2019 at 11:39

    175 km.7hrs. Far out!No wonder you look shattered in the photo Mark.The Triumph, even loaded with just the 2 of you will be a bit clumsy and needing more 'involvement' of rider a low speeds.Throw in the gear load you are carrying on top of that I'm sure a bit of speed and momentum makes it all much easier to handle behind the bars?Hope you don't have to cope with too many of those days.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Mark10 September 2019 at 08:28

    I’m not finding it too bad but by the end of the day the constant agression and tooting of horns does find the limits of my patience, it is a good indicator for us that it is time to stop.

    ReplyDelete

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