Friday Travel Pic, Baralacha La

This memory of wandering awestruck in Ladakh goes way back to the year 2007. My friends had planned about a month long biking expedition to Ladakh. I had no idea what and where Ladakh is, at that point, to be honest. But the idea was so exciting, and in so many ways. I was in my early 20s, had never been on a biking expedition, and certainly had never been to Ladakh.

I have never written about the entire Ladakh Biking experience but I sure have spoken about it with anyone and everyone I know, in detail, to an extent that they got tired of listening to me talk about Ladakh. My (now) husband (whom I met a few years after the Ladakh Biking trip) has heard it all so many times that he practically knows all the events that happened in that month-long trip and that too in a perfect order. I may write about that experience one day or maybe I won’t ever, but I sure will share some of it from time to time here on the blog.

We were a group of 12 travelling on ten bikes. My sister and I don’t ride bikes, so we rode pillion. I did not have a point and shoot or DSLR camera back then (I was a student, and also I had never given a thought to whether or not I like cameras as I was happily busy with the random things everyone does in their early 20s). Also I did not have a blog and social media wasn’t such an important part of our social lives back then. Which is why I never felt the need to document the trip, though I posted about it on Facebook a few months later. The thing is traveling like that was a great thing back then because I could thoroughly enjoy each and every moment and I was able to truly be in the moment without getting distracted.

I had a Nokia 5300 slider phone though that I used to capture some pics. I have lost most of the few pics that I had managed to click on my phone since. Unlike the smartphone, my Nokia phone was functioning for a few days allowing me to click pics. Thankfully I have some pics to look at and re-live the memories that my friends captured on their DSLRs.

The cover pic was clicked at Baralacha la – meaning the ‘Big Pass’ (La means a mountain pass) and the pic below shows me standing in front of the glaciers at Rohtang La or Rohtang pass along the bike that I was riding pillion on.