How to unwind yourself – Go for A Trip

It’s been a hectic day and I want a break! I’m so tired of this life, I want to be packed inside a box and thrown away in some river!

You might have thought about all this at some point of your life. Then, let me ask you a question.


Why do we want to detach ourselves so much from what we are presently doing, for example - from work, studies, marriage or kids?

My answer to this is - we wish to see beyond the routineness – beyond the sameness where we everyday - struggle in a 9 o’ clock fast local, haggle with the rickshaw guy, quarrel with our boss to secure our gtalk/facebook, elusively wait for a home cooked food or wait for our phone to get disconnected in the middle of a fight with the girl-friend when it’s our turn to say the mistake-acceptance speech.

Now all this, my friend, is called life if you’re still wondering. Life with all its vagaries and it can be inescapable unless you read below, how I managed to escape it.

A sunny day came, where I along with my few like-minded fed-up-of-this-world buddies assembled to give ourselves a long awaited break in the midst of mountainous Himalayas, deep gorging valleys, tall apple orchards and gushing stream of waterfalls.

I and my bunch of loonies decided to travel the State of Himachal Pradesh.

Initially, our plans were travelling Ladakh, but it was shelved because of the recent catastrophe of cloud-bursting. We had everything ready - the air-tickets, the cars on hire, the places to be visited, and most of all a prepared mind to go so far and at such an altitude. But, alas, it seems in hindsight that such a trip was never meant to be! Today, I earnestly hope that none of us lose that drive and momentum to visit Ladakh in future, because, after coming from Himachal, it seem to me like a step-son to what Ladakh would be.

We started our journey from Jammu after receiving few friends from Delhi. The flight was not at all comfortable, knowing that we were flying in a low-cost-budget airline; I am pre-empted not to complaint anything about the flight. We had hired a car and an experienced driver through a Bombay travel agency. The driver, Vijay was from Manali and he was awaiting us at the Jammu airport.

It was not the climate we were least expecting in Jammu, it was hot. In Jammu, there is not much to see, except if one wants to travel Amarnath Temple (Shiv temple) which is at few kilometres away from Jammu. After searching Vijay at the airport, we head longed for Dalhousie, our next destination, where we had to stay for two days in our 10 day long journey.

While in Jammu or some place between Jammu and Dalhousie, we stopped at a Dhaba to eat what our Delhi friends braggingly cooked and got for us along with the dhaba’s hot chai, hot aloo parantha and curd. The generous dhaba guy also got some of his trademark chutney to have it with aloo parantha. So we had a sumptuous meal and how lucky were we that we had our first lunch expense for a total of only Rs. 80. That is a cost of one man’s meal in any so-so kind of restaurants in Bombay.

We reached Delhousie in the evening and had to settle for a hotel. Since we had not pre-booked anything (not the least, a hotel), we had to search for a good hotel with a view especially.

We deliberately had not planned any bookings for the hotels.

A part of me believed that we should be back-packers (just pack a bag and jet along) and another part believed that pre-bookings would create a big hole in our pockets if we went with what all the tours and travel guys told us – the luxury/deluxe kind of hotels in the price range of 2500 – 3000 per night.

Therefore, as soon as we landed in Dalhousie, we just dispersed in different directions to seek a nice hotel amongst hordes of hotels we saw. We finally chose a hotel named Hill-View Hotel and in our 10 day Himachal journey, I can vouch for this hotel as the best one with an astounding view and a photographer’s delight.

About Delhousie and this hotel, to be continued….