Sona Mohapatra

Sometime back I heard this song called 'Abhi nahi aana...' by Sona Mohapatra. It had nice soothing music and the lyrics were also quite different.

Then a few days later I heard a feat of Sona with INXS! Amazing song again. Now Sona is back with another song... Check it out

Saurkundi Pass Trek continued...

Day 9: Climb down to Lekhni

The next morning we were a little bit better. I had had dinner the previous night. It was my first meal after the breakfast on Day7 at Maylee. Surprising thing is that I never got hungry anytime. Although it was still snowing, the visibility was much better. This was the day to climb down. And damn, it was a steep descent. And the snow made it slippery. I must mention Rakesh here, who was finding it very difficult to get down. He was slipping every 5 steps. Soon enough he stopped getting up and started sliding down instead of walking down. It was quite funny and we still make fun of him sometimes J As we slowly climbed down, snow changed to fleet and then to rain. I must confess, by the time we reached Lekhni, I was in pretty bad shape again.

The camp at Lekhni was much better than the rest. We had a wooden house here with 2 floors. You can’t imagine how good it feels to get into a wooden house after sleeping in tents for so long and in such terrible conditions. Once inside we started discussing about what we were going to do with the extra 4 days that we had. Rakesh had already booked his train tickets to return soon after the trek. Santa and Ramesh were also in a mood to go back immediately. So they tried to prepone their plane tickets. But they found out that it would be too expensive to do so. All things apart, none of us were in a mood for another trek [as we had planned]. We decided that we’ll doing some site seeing around Manali. As the night drew closer we realised that there was not enough room for all of us in the house. So I decided to join some LNUP guys in a tent nearby.

Till that night I never really interacted much with the LNUP guys. But that night there was no one from Adventura in that tent apart from me. Shailendra Barange was always friendly with me throughout the trek and he started talking to me. Soon enough all the LNUP guys were interviewing me! They would shoot questions one after the other in a kind off ragging way. I was not the least bit intimidated though. For one all these guys were younger than me and also there was Barange who was taking my side. Once they were done questioning me, we actually started talking. Not some useless chatter, but actual serious talk. As expected there were a lot of stories about the girls they liked. I was surprised to hear them talk so openly to me. It was as if I was chatting with my college buddies.

Day 10: Back to base camp

Next day it was a short trek down to ‘Aloo Maidan’ from where we boarded a bus back to Babeli. Once back in Babeli, we cleaned up and were out in the evening enjoying the masala papads again. There was river rafting going on in the river right in front of us, but we were specifically told not to go there. But then ‘Baba’ came to us with a friend of his and said they were 4 people short to go rafting. Ramesh and I agreed but we could not find anyone else. So, the four of us went rafting. I was rafting for the first time and I enjoyed it. There were not many rapids though. But the fun element of it kind of fades when u get wet and it starts getting cold. We left the base camp the next day and headed off to Manali

Roaming around in Manali:

• Roamed around Manali in the evenings (eating jalebies)
• Visited the Hidimba Temple
• Visited Snow point
• Visited Vasisth.
• Did paragliding. A jump off a cliff of 3500 feet! (This was the highlight of the trip for me)
• Visited Roerich Memorial
• Visited Naggar castle