How we got here? Check this out – Srinagar to Kargil – Getting Leh’d Part 2
Day 3
Places covered: Kargil – Fatula top – Lamayuru – Magnetic Hill – Leh
Distance covered: ~240 kms
It was 7am when we came out of the hotel room and started picking our bungee cords and rain covers to pack our luggage back to our bikes. This routine of unpacking and packing everyday already started boring us. It may sound as a simple task, but it is not. It is difficult to do it single handedly. You need at least one more person supporting you to tie these cords and double check to see if the bags won’t fall off while riding. Some of us switched our bikes to try other ones. And here we are ready to start our 3rd Day.
Kargil had a different feeling to it. For the first time in the past couple of days, we saw a proper operating town. School kids walking with their backpacks, cabs and bikes honking around, shops opened as usual and people moving around doing their regular chores. It felt whole. We stopped near a street vendor who was selling apples. What good is a Kashmir trip without some apples?
We started our ride towards Leh. The road from Kargil to Leh was truly amazing. These were one of the finest set of roads that we rode on the entire trip. We must appreciate BRO (The Border Roads Organisation) for their wonderful work of connecting such beautiful places. The roads cut straight though mountains and passes and it felt so satisfying to ride on them. The smooth hair pin bends where you feel the curves and empty long stretches with perfect view of the nature was incomparable.
Here are some ultra wide shots of them. I intentionally did not crop these images.
(PS: In case if you are on a PC/laptop, click on the image to see an enlarged view)
More roads 🙂
After around 80+ kms we reached Fatula Top (or called as Fotu La). It is the highest mountain pass in Srinagar to Leh Highway with an elevation of 13,478 ft. We stopped there for a little while to take pictures. We also did manage to arrange our bikes and capture some shots.
As you can see we were all such bad posers. We were just staring here and there trying to look candid in the photo but nothing came out well. Bhanu took some serious effort to make us pose well by bringing out our emotions to get at-least one good shot 😛 and here it is.
The wind on the top was heavy. One of Anand’s gloves flew off the mountain top and fell on the other side of the edge. Not deep but around 15 feet down the mountain slope. It was a little steep to climb down but he did not have any option. He had to get it back as we didn’t have any spare. Lucky for him that only his glove flew that day. Because on Day 13 there was something else that flew off the mountain which none of us expected! 😛 Here he is climbing up after picking up the glove.
Soon after that we left Fatula top, rode 15 kms further and reached Lamayuru. We stopped there for lunch. Ordered some fried rice and rotis and while waiting for the order to arrive, five of us went to visit the Lamayuru Monastery which was very close by. The rest of them stayed back at the restaurant. The monastery had an entry ticket of Rs.50 for each person. We got the tickets and went in. There were huge Tibetan prayer wheels that were hung outside the monastery which I had seen only in movies before. The place was so calm. As we entered in, we saw monks sitting inside a room chanting some mantras. You couldn’t tell if they were singing or chanting. It was that synchronous and soothing to hear. There were people who were sitting in the corner of the room and meditating. We went around the room looking at the photos of monks which were hung on the wall. We spent some time there and left back to the restaurant.
More Pictures from Lamayuru..
After our lunch we started towards Magnetic Hill. We wanted to reach there before sunset. Having seen how it looked in photos earlier, we were eager and were looking forward to experience it in real. We didn’t want to miss it by any chance. The weather was cool and it seemed like it was going to rain but it didn’t. Magnetic hill was another 88 kms from Lamayuru. We estimated a two hour ride to reach there and we were on track. We stopped at a shop in Saspol for some refreshment. We had some juice and chocolate as we didn’t get tea. There were two kids playing alone outside the shop. One was a football fan and other was a cricket fan and I guess for some reason they didn’t want to play together. We joined them for some fun.
Some pics.
The road from Saspol to Magnetic Hill was fantastic. It was even better than what you saw in the above pictures. I’ll soon post videos from this location. We reached Magnetic Hill half an hour before sunset. The light was perfect. We were standing right on it, the road that defies gravity. If you are not aware what a Magnetic hill is then you may have to do a little background analysis. In simple terms, if you stop your vehicle on this road with Neutral gear and engine shut down, the vehicle will automatically move up the hill. We sat on our bikes and tried to see if this phenomenon actually worked. Nothing really happened. Maybe we were not ready to remove our feet off the ground with the engines turned off :D. But there were other cars and travel cabs that were trying the same and we saw them move up the hill with their engines shut down. More than experimenting with these stuff, we enjoyed being there. We also met few other bikers who were from Tamil Nadu, doing a 7 day trip across Leh-Ladakh. There was also ATV rides available in Magnetic hill which I believe is a recent addition to this spot. I put my Nikon camera to full use for the first time in the trip. Here is a picture of the location that I captured.
And here we are posing together.
The below picture was taken after sunset. The orange rays vanishing behind the mountains with the moon at one side.
We started towards Leh after it got dark and reached by 7.30 pm. The place looked like a typical tourist spot. We saw a lot of people from different countries in Leh. We already had a Hotel’s location in Leh which the rental guys shared us. The traffic on the road was dense and it took some time for us to reach the hotel which finally brought day 3 to an end.
Video of our ride to Leh will be coming soon.
creativentechno 
Beautiful 🙂
Thank you Joshi 🙂