Up the Rohtang! (that is not rude by the way)

We woke up to a very misty morning, at about 6am. We could see that our time clocks were going to change somewhat, bed at sunset and get up at sunrise.

Soon the sun came out and burnt it all off, we packed up the tents and headed off on our merry way. We only had what we thought was an easy small bit left up to the pass. This quickly turned into the hardest bit of the whole route. There were road works being done all the way up and the road was massively chewed up and very hard to cycle on making it very hard work

Some of the road works completely blocked the road again which was great for us as we had no trucks blowing their exhausts into our faces. As we approached sections like this, we were greeted by many envious faces of car drivers as we picked our bikes up and picked our way through the works, to then merrily continue on our way as they sit there at the mercy of the incompetence of the bulldozer to be delicate and make a right mess.

After 3 hours of riding up difficult roads we finally reached our first major Pass. At 3980 it was only to be a small one, but still at that time the highest any of us had been on a bike.

It was a little underwhelming, no real signs just a lot of Indian tourist wearing badass 80s all-in-ones wondering around with retro skis.It did have the obligatory prayer flags though and a great view into the Chandra Valley where everything all of a sudden seem to get a lot bigger and have white on top. The best bit of getting to the top was the fact that we could at least go down hill! Having spent the last 2 days riding up hill gravity assistance was greatly appreciated.
Above is us going down from the Rohtang, in the picture is one of the offending trucks. They are all highly decorated and are all the same make 'TATA'. At night time the drivers have what can only be described as 'disco lights' inside the cabins. This is probably do keep them awake as they do monster journeys in them.
The road turned smooth again and progress was fast, until another traffic jam

A convoy of army trucks, one of them had over heated and blocked the path. No worries for us, bikes are small and we could squeeze passed them with more envious looks from others. We got to the bottom of the valley and stopped in Khoksar for some lunch and had to sign in at the police checkpoint for the road. It was around 2pm and we only had 8km more to get to our original planned camping spot. We decided we were good and we should try and push on a bit more.

So off we went, looking at the map it showed it should be fairly flat and not too far. The mountains where getting bigger and bigger and some we had to stop for a while and just look at them
After a few minutes was spent drawing imaginary lines up them on the way in which we would try and climb them (mine were usually the safe route up the sides and Scott's always seemed to be the more direct steeper routes) we set off again. We did not seem to be making much progress through the villages on the map. I checked the maps scale again my speedo on my bike. I then worked out that Indian maps where not worth the paper they are printed on.

What then ensued is another race to get somewhere before it got dark. We were all completely knackered by the time we finally reached our destination that night, a town called Keylong.

Poor Lara really was having a sense of humour failure at this point, so I promised her the best hotel in town. We found the best hotel, and it can only be described as disappointing. It did however serve good food. We decided that the next day would be a rest day as we had done 90km this day and Keylong was at 3200m so a good altitude to spent more time at to acclimatise as from there on it got higher and higher.

So the next day was spent relaxing and watching dodgy Indian TV. They have even worse adverts than the French which I thought was impressive. It was a this point that I checked over the bikes to see if everything was o.k. e.t.c.. I asked Lara if I could have the chain lube as the chains were so dry from the last two days. She turned her bags upside down and announced she did not have it. Oh shit. The though of trying to ride for another 10 days with dry chains filled us with no confidence. Scott and I went out on mission 'find chain lube'. Of course there were no Halfords around when you need one, we did however find a guy repairing motorcycles on his dining table and so we gestured (no mutual language was spoken) if he had lube for chains. That came up blank so we decided to go for the next best thing; engine oil.

We came home and found Lara upset, she said she could not get clean. The bathroom was not the most pleasant of places. Lara doesn't believe the photo does it justice though for just how terrible it was.

(she made me take a picture of it) she was to scared to get in the bath as it was so dirty. She proclaimed through sobs "I don't think I'm cut out for Indiaaaaaaaaaa " That night to make it better I promised her that she would be able to find a nice clean mountain water river tomorrow to wash in. As time went on I learnt to stop making promises...