The trend had started 2 years ago, I had to goto Banglore for some work and I made it a family holiday by extending my leave and visitied Mysore, Ooty etc. Then it was a short tour to Mahabaleswar last year. This year, we wanted to visit north, started planning for it, dropped it and finally made it just 4 days before school vacations gets over.
It was Delhi-Shimla-Manali-Chandigad-Delhi trip for 8 days by a Tata Indica. We opted for it over a tour by bus for convinient timings, but now prefer the bus :-) as you are at the mercy of driver. The driver we had was new to the route and the car was not licensed to "tour", so he always had a fear of getting caught by Police and avoided the normal routes.
Shimla is beautiful. We enjoyed the travel, nature, the valleys and the greenness. The roads are not good, but the places are crowdy. Visited the Kufri and Naldara (places around Shimla) and had a good evening walk on the mall road. The old constructions still carry the British memories with them and as usual I wondered about their sense of local needs and constraints. The buildings they had built made optimum use of natural resources and are suited to the local conditions.
Best part of Shimla was that all the houses, buildings are on hills. My hotel had 12 floors and 12th floor had an exit on one of the Shimla road :-) For some of the buildings, top floor is road approaching and instead of going up by lift, you may go down 4-5 floors.
After Shimla, it was a day long hectic travel to Manali. Though it was hectic travel, we experienced the scenic beauty along. Our most of the travel was through valleys, mountains, passes and at last along side of river bias (It is actually Vyas river named after Rishi Vyas who wrote Mahabharata). We could not control the temptation of experiencing the fresh river water flow and had a 45 minute break to experience the cold water of river. It was a pleasure to experience the water which is not polluted and was absolutely clean (we make a mess of river water after it starts becoming useful to human beings).
We had a 3 day stay in Manali. First we visited Manikaran and then did local site seeing. Manikaran journey was little hot as it was sunny day. The journey is as usual good as we had gone through the mountains, valleys, waterfalls.
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