After sleeping for what felt like eternity, I opened my eyes Thursday morning to find myself staring westward through a large picture window at a towering rocky summit with trails of old snow tracing down through the ravines. Morning light from the east frosted the ragged peaks with the green hills below still shrouded in dawn shadows. I looked at my phone: 5:29 am. No street traffic, no drone of air conditioning, just crisp mountain air and bird song drifting in through the open window. Forget sleep, this was all I'd dreamt of through months of debilitating heat and toxic air back in Delhi. I felt like a kid on Christmas. Just let me get out there, and hold my calls.
There are tipping points in any vacation, and by Thursday our journey teetered on a knife's edge. Wednesday's trials had just about done us all in, and although I had reiterated my desire to do as little as possible upon reaching Burwa--beyond casual hiking and staring at the mountains from the balcony of the hotel room--Rakesh aspired to go sightseeing and touring around Manali and the surrounding area. We wanted none of it. Everyone needed a rest day, and where better to rest than a quiet mountain village along a roaring river tucked away in the foothills of the Himalayas? As fate would have it, the Innova needed serious repairs following the breakdown Wednesday night and remained out of commission until early Friday afternoon. Poor Raju had to deal with all that, but as far as I was concerned, we'd reached the mountaintop.
Once Allie and I had breakfasted at the hotel buffet and returned to the room to drink excessively sweet milk coffee while looking out over the green valley below and south towards Manali, we set off through the village to find the Burwa-Solang trail, which I had scouted on AllTrails earlier that morning. It looked to be an appropriate length and degree of difficulty for our purposes, and most importantly, reaching the trailhead would not require a vehicle. According to the map, one of the village roads narrowed into a foot path less than a kilometer uphill from the Kalista. On the way out the door, the cheerful desk attendant asked where we were headed, no doubt eager to help us find somewhere to throw our money. We told him we just wanted to walk, and he directed us to the nearby "locals" trail.
Hiking out through Burwa Village with Nike sneakers and a North Face day pack, I soon sensed what he meant. The looks that flashed our way suggested the villagers had probably seen foreigners before, but that it probably doesn't happen too often. We passed schools, in session despite the current summer holiday throughout much of India; houses and barns with heavy slate roofs, some with livestock chained out front; endless apple orchards, a staple of the Himachal agrarian economy; men chiseling blocks of white granite by hand, many of which presumably go to build and maintain the rough walls surrounding the orchards; women carrying oversize bushels of brush, sticks, and lord knows what else down the mountainside on their backs; and just as the road narrowed into a cobbled horse trail, we passed several Royal Enfield motorcycles parked in the grass. Indian-built, classy rides. We never encountered their riders.
With the steady gains in elevation, the landscape around us became increasingly pristine. We pulled off the trail once to sit by the stream and let a couple Himachali gentlemen pass on horseback. Drawing closer to the larger mountains now, the weather shifted and we felt a few light rain showers. As we approached Solang Valley, a large industrial-looking complex came into view across the river and we stopped to assess the situation. A few hundred yards uphill, we spotted people ripping past on ziplines and decided we'd hiked far enough. Sitting on a boulder next to rushing water, we rested and watched the zipliners from a safe distance. Later we learned Rakesh and his family had hired a cab to Solang Valley, where he and Divyansh rode the very same ziplines that afternoon. From that rock, Allie and I took a series of our best selfies to date with Patalsu Peak rising up 14k feet behind us in all of it's snow-capped glory. I shared one of them in my first Himachal post, so I'll share the "silly face" version here (I almost never make a silly face, and Allie reliably makes the same silly face almost every time).
From Solang, we descended by the same route and returned to our room at the Kalista. I'm happy to report that practically nothing else happened until Raju arrived with his repaired clutch around 1 pm Friday and we set off for lunch down next to the river in Old Manali. There was a short-lived effort to hire a cab to Manali Thursday night, but after watching the traffic boil over in real-time on Google Maps we decided to bag it. Thank god we did. That stretch of nearly 40 hours in Burwa without setting foot near a vehicle, basking in the stunning views and clean mountain air, and eating tasty meals delivered to our hotel room on demand tipped the the balance of the trip. It was the vacation we'd wanted, and it justified all the grueling hours on the road that came before and after.
The gang's whole vibe had changed by the time we left Kalista Friday afternoon. Tanshu had stopped crying (for the most part) and wanted to be friends--unimaginable just 48 hours prior. By Saturday afternoon he was dancing with us to Rakesh's customary Panjabi soundtrack and sitting on our laps in the middle row of the Innova. No one got sick on the return trip, though the final 14-hr drive from Kullu to Delhi was more than anyone had bargained for--it being closer to 11 hours on paper. The traffic along our route both in and out of Himachal proved worse than we could have imagined, but it was the price we paid for two blissful days of doing close to nothing in the dreamscape of the high Himalayan foothills. The road wore us down, but the mountains reinvigorated each and every one of us. Now a week later, the fatigue has subsided but the rich memories of Burwa Village remain. If we could do it all over again, I'd just want to stay there longer. I guess that's the mark of a memorable vacation.
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