I was struggling to perfect parallel turns and resting between attempts at the bottom of the ski slope. A girl came down in full speed – the kind of speed that we had seen only with instructors, and turned suddenly a little ahead of where I was standing, and braked to a quick halt. I was impressed.
“I thought you are going to fall..”, I said to her.
And shyly she replied, “I thought so too..!”
At Auli, in February 2006.
Snow filled slopes of Auli
When I am on long journeys, I usually make sure to carry a guide book. They are of great help when looking for accommodation and directions. Those who carry heavy backpack weighing 15 kilos and need to look for a place to stay on arrival know how much a pain it is, and how guidebooks simplify the process by a great deal. There are many more uses that make a guidebook an important necessity for me, but let’s not get into details of all that.
The problem that I had, was that all these books are too heavy and add a great deal to the already painful weight. My lonely-planet probably weighs a kilo, and it is a significant addition. The first time I embarked on a long journey with the book, I pondered a bit on this burden. I kept thinking for a while; the book has information on entire India but I was going to only a few places, and was to use just 10% of the book. So I decided to tear out and take with me only the necessary pages. For someone who loves books, it was like a painful thing to do, but it was a great way of cutting of some extra weight.
Torn pages of LP
Now each time I am getting out on a long trip, I spend a good 15 minutes pulling out pages from LP(it is tough to get those pages out without any damage to those pages and to the book), and then rebinding those pages with paper clips!
After completing the North-East trip story, I was thinking about starting writing on Himachal trip, but thought will deviate a bit from the usual routine of posting trip reports one after other and have some change here. So next few weeks on India Travel Blog will be about things related to travel that I found interesting, or some trivia, or stuff that attracted me during my many journeys, and things of such kind. Right now, I can’t really think of what to write, but hopefully some ideas will surface in the coming days. In the meanwhile, if there is something you can think of, or something you want me to write about, do drop me a comment.
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