One of the inspectors who wasn’t present the previous evening (or atleast i dont remember seeing him), who was more city-bred types, reasoned that we city-folks should understand the difference between interacting with city girls and the ghunghat clad types. Never look a gift horse in the mouth they say; and never argue with a Jat! So we left it at that. Leaving the hospital at noon, we retired to the lodge where plans were refined further: Chandigarh was dropped and we decided that the recuperation would be better in Manali!
We dropped in at the police station to leave a bottle of rum in thanksgiving and returned back to the lodge for a good nights sleep. Tomorrow would be another day on the road! A long ride (in the circumstances) to a place called Anandpur-Sahib. Another day in what was a very eventful ride indeed!
It is incidents like these that reinforce my almost stubborn refusal to ride at night, and restrict riding to daylight hours. Would an incident like this have happened if we had crossed at dusk as per the original plan? Is it that difficult to make an early 5am start and close the ride at dusk? Point to ponder no?
Postscript: As i said it was overall one eventful ride. All sorts of challenges that we hadn’t anticipated or planned for! All of us had to see the doctor atleast once at various times and for various reasons in the 28 odd days we spent together. One of us even underwent an operation! Thankfully my bike held up like a baby throughout, barring for some misfiring problems climbing up the mighty Tanglang-la. It was also the ride that my EOS350D, my first Digital SLR, chose to commit suicide after 3 years of trouble free service! My CF cards kept failing arbit which had me calling up people asking what Err99 meant!! And finally, we started the ride separately: Param from Daund, Manish from Pune, Joggy from his military unit near Lonavala and myself from Mumbai; and we were destined to end it separately. Manish decided to end his ride at his hometown Ludhiana on the way back from Leh. Joggy went AWOL somewhere near Karnal on the way back, while Param and I split at Nashik, with him heading for Pune while i headed for Mumbai. As it turns out, i spent the maximum amount of road-time with param, who i had met for the first time at Mount Abu!
Part 2 coming up very soon….!
