When we arrived in Vashisht in the Spring the fields, plants and orchards were awakening. Then came summer with the apples and vegetable gardens producing their crop. Autumn meant everything being harvested - apples being sent throughout India and overseas and garden produce being sold in the markets or dried for eating in the winter. Now Winter is approaching and all the grass is being cut so that the animals can be fed in their barns in the Winter and final preparations being done to dry out food. When we arrived the weather was lovely, then came the monsoon rains followed by lovely weather again. Now it has turned very cold, even in daytime when the sky is clear blue. The snow is now visible on the mountain tops that we can see from our balcony - the one just in the middle of the pic.
The same pic using the zoom lens. When we see the snow getting this close we know it's time to go down to the plains to Goa and the lure of eating meat and having a G&T at sundown becomes quite strong. We are leaving tomorrow, Friday 19/10, and instead of taking our usual route down - 14 hour bus journey to Dheli, 26 hour train journey to Goa and then 1 hour taxi to Agonda - we are riding on the bike. It is 2500kms but we also have to drive over into Nepal for one day to fulfill nour visa requirements. We plan to take 3-4 weeks, stopping off at places for a few days that we find interesting. This is the plan so let's see. Hope to keep up the blog on the way as we need to have somewhere to record our potential disasters, especially when driving an 8 year old Royal Enfield through India with no mechanical knowledge between us and trusting maps that conflict with each other!
Our last night has been really good. It's nice on our last night to take everyone down to Manali Town to a restaurant for dinner but at the moment Pritam is busy working in his high pastures and Champa is working for the village carrying and cutting large rocks to strengthen the river banks. So, Colin and I got a take-away of chicken and mutton and brought it back to the house. Oh and a wee bottle of whiskey. We had a wee house party and Champa loves a party. Champa made rice and chapattis so we had a good feed.
Chapattis on the tandoor. Asna cuddles Pritam.
Champa burning the fingers off herself getting the chapattis off the tandoor.
Asna and daddy, Mani. She's looking up at her mummy Laxmi. We had a great evening as always - much laughter and fun. Feels really sad knowing that we are leaving Vashisht and closing up the main kitchen for the night and exchanging our farewells was really sad.
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