Operation Desert Mountain

Achieving Rohtang Pass!

It was around noon that we reached our target - Rohtang Pass! To be honest, it was kind of an anti-climax to what I had been imagining. The mental picture of the pass that I had formed involved a long line of cars and bikes, all moving up slowly, carefully and maybe, rejoicing once they got to the top.

This was quite a damper on that image - no drum roll, no flashing lights, no newspaper reporters, just a desolate mountain road with thousands of colourful little flags. We had trouble believing this was it! True, we had had quite an adventurous journey up here, but seriously, this is it?

We got the reward just after we started the descent from Rohtang. We turned a corner and there it was, the most beautiful view we had ever seen in our entire lives! I am putting the photos here but they don’t really do justice to what we saw and felt, they just can’t!

Two mountain ranges, between them this deep, deep valley, if you looked closely you could see a small river way down there like a line on a gigantic map. On the mountain range opposite us we could see some trickles of water which we guessed were from ice melting somewhere high up. Our immediate reaction was to stop the engines, park the bikes on the left and climb down to our right.

And that was silly! Not dangerous, not even stupid, just silly.

If we had kept driving on the same road as we were, after a hairpin bend we would have arrived at the same spot without any heavy walking or climbing down on that high altitude. We were halfway down to the spot where we wanted to reach when we noticed this road. So we had to make a decision – continue down or go back up and drive down?

We decided to send 2 people, the drivers - that’s me and SB - back up to bring the bikes by the long road while the other two would continue climbing down and meet us there.

As a result we were able to take what turned out to be the only pictures of any of us riding the bikes. The first one is SB on the Enfield Bullet, the next two I on my Kinetic Laser. Hey, what can I say, I was driving slow!