Patnitop, Leh Road Trip Day 2
Chandigarh to Patnitop, Jammu
We started early from Chandigarh to make the most of day light. We had only two rules for this trip:
- No driving at night.
- Eat breakfast. Always.
- Listen to the wife. So three rules.
Distance between Chandigarh and Patnitop is 410 Kms. That is easily a 10 hours drive if things go as per plan. IF! We took the Pathankot-Udhampur route. And all hail Murphy, it started to rain. Heavily. We had not even reached Pathankot yet.
As unpredictability started to befriend us, we drove slowly but did not stop and were able to cross Pathankot and enter Jammu around 0130 pm.
Humans gotta eat and leak. Hungry, we wanted to break for Lunch. Looked for a decent place but found only disappointment. Here I would like to mention that I am a vegetarian (Yas Yas! the grass eating people) so challenges were multi-fold. In the search process, we missed a right turn from Samba and continued straight. But that became a blessing. In about 15 mins, we reached Resort 17 Miles. It was huge, had ultra clean washrooms and good stuff to eat. Seeing the other options that came our way (restaurant that had a bathroom that was full of spiders, no kidding) 17 Miles was a relief. Stayed there for one hour, refreshed and energized, we hit the road again. We had to go back to the turn we missed. So this became off route by around 30 minutes in total. An off route I am glad we took. We started for Udhampur and the ascend begun. We could now see fewer cars on the road. Then came this beautiful water body, a little after Samba. It was Lake Mansar. We simply had to check it out and stopped for a bit by the lake.
By evening we had reached Udhampur. It was another 50 km to Patnitop. It was now 7ish and day light had almost faded. Things got real cold and misty.
We were ecstatic to see the sign board for ‘JKTDC’. There are various hotels that are grouped within JKTDC. We had made our reservations in Hotel Alpine in advance. The tariff was INR 2000 (~ USD 30) per night. The room was spacious and decent. There was only one problem, everything including the mattresses was a bit moist. The hotel in-charge later told us that Patnitop is heavy on moisture and things are almost always damp. It gets worse in rainy season when clothes won’t dry off for days. We went to the hotel restaurant for dinner. It was 8 pm now. We ate dal-subzi-rice with some coffee. We were hungry and tired and the food was hot. In that moment, it tasted much better than most 5 star dinners that we might have had before. Exhausted, I dozed off as soon as I hit the bed.
