Mission Ladakh - Aug 09

Well last weekend I returned back to Bangalooru and again been caught up with my daily drudgery. But hangover of our grand trip to Ladakh is still looming large in my mind and I am pretty much sure it will be in my mind for quite some time. I have been inching to write a travelogue on this since I came back from Ladakh and I must say these posts will remain close to my heart for a long long time.

Where it all begin
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Perhaps idea of visiting Ladakh germinates in my mind when I was traveling in Sikkim some 7 years back and one of my friends told me about it. But that was just a part of it. At that time, I thought Ladakh as just another part of J’n’K, which will be very risky to travel due to soaring insurgency and terrorism. But in due coarse I came to know a lot about Ladakh and I made of my mind to visit the place someday for sure. Since last 3-4 years, I have been harboring this thought and have been planning of visiting Ladakh quite seriously but somehow we could not take these umpteen plans to logical end, due to various constraints and we end up visiting Goa/Kerela/Gokarna, cheap and easily reachable substitutes of Ladakh.

Some 2-3 months back I was surfing television when I chanced upon a TV series in NDTV-Goodtimes named “ROADTRIP” where 7-8 bikers took a trip to Ladakh for 3 weeks and share there experience. After watching it my hidden and dormant urge to visit Ladakh was at peak like never before. Same evening Vinayak called me we had our regular discussion lamenting everything starting from regular day–to-day work to boring life to IT industry in general. It was there I told him about visiting Ladakh this summer as I knew if we didn’t make the trip this year then we will have to wait for another summer. Initially I am sure he might have thought I am kidding and not serious about this trip but somehow we went ahead with the plan. I conveyed my plan to Hemant and Suresh and Vinayak told about this to Bibin.We booked the tickets once I get confirmation from everybody and we fixed on 15th August 2009 for starting from Bangalore/Hyderabad. Later Pratap also joined us as we started researching and preparing for our grand Ladakh sojourn. Just few days before we were all set for the journey swine flu pandemic hit India.I along with my parents, was a bit skeptic and concerned about the whole trip. But I didn’t allow it to come in between and went ahead with it with added expenditure of face-mask in our budget.