11 Jun 2016

Manali II - No, tell me more about this weed!

So, Manali. I’ll remember Manali as one of the many places I would have liked to explore further. Since my silly eTourist visa only let me stay in India for 30 days, I only spent a total of 1.5 days in Manali…about as much time as I spent on the bus there and back.

The landscapes around Manali are strikingly beautiful, with forrest-covered mountains, roaring waterfalls and staggering views just begging to be explored in extended hikes. Due to the time constraint (and lack of equipment) I decided to limit my excursions to Manali town. Manali itself is distinctly tourist-y, with that in-your-face mixture of western-style cafes and restaurants, clothes that go well with dreadlocks and a hundred travel agencies.

Four things I recall most keenly:

Weather

The first thing I noticed up there: I did not feel like I was being roasted alive on a pyre of burning stars! Due to the altitude the state of Himachal Pradesh enjoys a temperate climate (and snow in winter!) which felt incredibly refreshing as I had been sweat-soaked ever since I left the Georgian mountains two months earlier. When I reached Manali it was a rainy, foggy, somewhat windy 13°C and loved every second of it.

The climate also means that the countryside looks a lot more like the Northern Europe I’m used to. Walking around town in the shade of the tall conifers made me feel oddly…home.

Historical sidenote: The British Raj had its summer residence in the town of Shimla, some hundred kilometers south of Manali for this very reason: British people are as ill-suited for the Indian summer as I am.

Plant life

Given the sheer abundance of natural beauty there is a ton of things you can do. You can buy weed, sell weed, cook with weed, eat weed, drink weed, buy weed paraphernalia, and some people apparently even smoke weed.

And more importantly, you can talk about weed. Since weed is clearly the most interesting topic in the world, there are so many facets to be discussed, weed-smoking-anecdotes to be recounted and hopes of future weed-related adventures to be shared.

This is a view widely shared amongst the crowds of Israeli and Russian backpackers that tend to prowl that whole triangle between Dharamsala, Rishikesh and Manali. Talking to them I found out that some of them had ended up staying in Manali for months when they had planned on staying a few days. Almost as if something made them a bit lazy and passive…

Since I’m not that interested in this side of botany (or other chemical experiments conducted there), I was glad to find two people who were also more interested in the town and we had a look around the town and its surroundings despite the unpredicatable weather and frequent rain.

Mud. Mud everywhere

Oh yes, rain. In a town that doesn’t really do paved roads and is blessed with livestock aplenty. Basically most of Manali is mud of various origins and when I was there I stood in it up to my ankles.

Who said boots weren’t any good for travel in India? For the record: They are. They are absolutely perfect for that.

Impossible interwebs

I had one last educational moment when I logged onto the homestay wifi to send a few emails. Nothing much seemed to happen connection-wise and I tried a ping-command, just to see how bad things were. Oh boy…

The ping tool sends a stream of data packets to a specified destination and measures how long it takes to return. When I ping google.com from home, I get times of 20-50ms. In Manali I did not see any replies coming back at all. Yet the packets did not time out either. Frustrated, I headed out for dinner and when I got back I saw that my loyal packets had indeed returned.

64 bytes from 78.47.139.10: icmp_seq=3212 ttl=46 time=1614652.104 ms
64 bytes from 78.47.139.10: icmp_seq=3213 ttl=46 time=1613654.267 ms
64 bytes from 78.47.139.10: icmp_seq=3214 ttl=46 time=1612656.231 ms
64 bytes from 78.47.139.10: icmp_seq=3217 ttl=46 time=1609908.252 ms
64 bytes from 78.47.139.10: icmp_seq=3218 ttl=46 time=1608912.793 ms

Yes, measured times of 1.6 million ms. That’s 27 minutes. I didn’t even know that was technically possible and I still suspect that it really shouldn’t be. Either way, I had a good laugh and went to bed.

Until next time,
Arne