The Marsimik La Adventure – Day 1
All pepped up to start our Marsimik La adventure, we flew into Chandigarh from Goa on 25th July 2014 and took a cab straight to the DTDC warehouse to collect our motorcycles and start riding. To our horror we were told that our motorcycles hadn’t yet arrived. This in spite of intentionally shipping our motorcycles with a couple of days buffer time so that they would be ready for us when we landed. Dejected, we checked into a hotel and and decided to spend a better part of the evening in a typical Chandigarh tavern.
We woke up the next day, did some outdoor gear shopping in Chandigarh and returned to the DTDC warehouse to find that our motorcycles had arrived but were damaged. To our dismay we figured that it would take us another 24 hours to get our motorcycles fixed and roadworthy. Our flights back from Leh to Goa were already booked and we realized that if we were to make it to Marsimik La and do everything else we planned to do along the way, we would need to somehow find the time and energy to ride hard and long to make up for the two days lost in Chandigarh.
On the afternoon of 27th July, after a 48 hour delay, we loaded our motorcycles and finally rode out of Chandigarh towards Manali.
We stopped at Shimla for tea and planned the future course of action.
It became evident to us that we would not be able to reach Manali before nightfall. So we decided to ride as far as we could, stop for the night and head out early morning to meet the backup vehicle in Manali by late morning. At 9 pm we stopped at a village called Barmana and had Maggi noodles for dinner.
We rested a while and continued riding towards Manali. At 11 pm we reached Mandi and decided to call it a day. We had been riding for 9 hours straight while trying not to get killed by the crazy Himachal Pradesh truck drivers. We checked into a hotel and crashed for the night.
Here is a video of the day’s ride.
