Manali

Quick note> For some reason, and because I'm a couple of stubbies short of a six pack in the computer department, the entry for Amritsar is before Bombay, even though I wrote it after and it occurred after Bombay... so if you haven't seen it yet you have to scroll down past Bombay..

July 13-17

Manali is at the base of the Himalaya mountain range, and is green green green. We felt like we were in the 'Sound of Music' 'The hills are alive.....with the sound of music.....lalalala!' Actually maybe that was just me, Jon hasn't seen it, but he still dug all the greenness and mountainess and fresh airiness though.

We got met at the bus stop at 6am by Kim from Kunal lodge, and usually we're pretty wary of touts at bus stops or train stations and ignore them, but he was nice and we weren't to grumpy from our trip and the price was definitely right .

He took us to his lodge which was near the Hadimba temple-so there were lots of locals going to pay their respects, and the temple was surrounded by pine trees, green flowery meadows and babbling creeks (could so hear them babbling from our room!). Queue more Sound of the Music.....

We were amazed at all the openly growing marijuana plants, pretty much they were everywhere, gardeners would show them to us proudly, and everyone was very keen to help you acquire some if you hadn't already.

Manali was pretty touristy, it was by far the most amount of tourists we'd seen anywhere else in India, it being the right season to visit and all, unlike any other part of India.

We were pretty far from the action though and it was nice and quiet in between new and old Manali, we had an awesome local cafe to eat in that served yummy MoMo's and played continuously on repeat some classical Hindi music.. this helped to drown out the Sound of Music soundtrack anyway.

We recovered from our dust induced blocked upness, only to fall ill from poisoning....

Indian beer is poison, I am sorry to any Indian readers or anyone who likes it. Everyone that we drank with that night was ill.

One day after we had sufficiently recovered from our poisoning we decided to kill ourselves and walk to a local waterfall, .

Man with his donkeys on the way to our waterfall, this was the nice bit, before it got steep and we got puffy and red in the face...

Beneath the waterfall.

It was worth the near death experience.

We also checked out a festival at the Hadimba temple for a goddess that was an incarnate of Kali and involved sheep and cow sacrifices. A local man told us it was better then in the days they used to have human sacrifices for the festival. In this picture they are all waiting for the free meal provided by the sacrificed.

We were a bit over taking pictures by this point and did not take as many photos as we had been.

We were sad to leave after four days, we would have loved to do some more walks (even if they killed us), gone white water rafting, explored other towns and just do nothing, but we had a plane to catch, and it wasn't going to catch itself, so it was one night bus to busy hot smelly Delhi.