Rockin' the Himalayas: Day 5: Bad Roads, Altitude Lethargy, Killer Indian Music, and a Cool Double Glacier

9/10/11 (Guidebook Day 5A)

Today was mostly a driving day. Our main goal was to pass over the Rohtang La pass, which is the only way to get from Manali to Keylong. It involves going from ~6,000 ft in Manali to ~12,000 ft at the top of the pass and back down to ~10,000 ft in Keylong. Although the pass is only 70 km long, it took about 7 hours from when we started going up to when we got to the bottom.

I suffered a pretty solid case of altitude sickness today. Although I didn’t actually physically get ill, I was completely apathetic to everything. I didn’t want to get out of the car when we stopped for pictures, and keeping my eyes open at all was a real feat. Even when we were going along the horribly bumpy and muddy roads of the pass (which bounced us around like a rag doll making sleep impossible), and even when I really wanted to do was stay in the conversation my car was having, all I could bring myself to do was curl up, close my eyes, and disassociate. I didn’t want to move if at all possible. Even getting out for lunch was difficult (even though it’d been about 7 hours since breakfast).

Having said that, once we traveled back down a reasonable amount and were almost down to Keylong, I all of a sudden felt spectacular again! I got out to take pictures and I danced along to the Indian music the drivers were playing. I seem to be the only one that was affected much by the altitude today, which is good odds. I am realllly hoping I will not turn into such a motionless lump tomorrow. We are scheduled to climb from ~10,000 ft to ~16,600 ft, and then back down to ~15,000 for the night.

Side note: the Indian music some of the drivers have been listening to has been super awesome. Some of it kind of even reminded me of what they would play at a Rudy's if it existed in India. (For those of you non-Stanford people, Rudy's is just a dance place in Palo Alto.) I requested that two of the drivers let me put their music (which they had on thumb drives) onto my computer. They handed their thumb drives over willingly and asked for English speaking music in exchange. They seemed to really like dance-y music, so that’s what I gave them. One of them even requested Lady Gaga by name. Love it! Now Lady Gaga, Ke$ha, and some Bootie SF mash-ups, among others, will be played in cars around the streets of India.

I’m totally going to be putting my new Indian dance music in rotation in my car when I get home.

Now for PICTURES!

This is what the roads looked like going up the pass. Actually, they got much worse than this. It was ridiculous.