Over 2000 Km by road, in around 10 days. Stunning landscapes, wonderful people. That sums up our Ladakh trip. But how did it actually work? How did we make it happen? Read on to find out! Leh, the capital of Ladakh , is accessible by air and road. Flying into Leh is the easiest, and time-saving option, while the road is the time consuming one, but with the added advantage of driving past some of the most beautiful landscapes in our country. Each option has much to recommend it, and we chose the road for just one reason – altitude sickness. Altitude sickness was one of my biggest concerns, since I suffer from motion-sickness. Yes, I do travel a lot, but that is despite my condition, and, over the years, have learnt how to handle it. I struggled with it when we visited Nathu-La in Sikkim, and wondered if I would be able to manage a week at the even higher altitudes that we would encounter in Ladakh. This was the reason we stuck to a basic plan, of only 9 days in Ladakh, thoug...
Our first visit to Wai was by chance. We were on the way to Satara, to attend a festival at the temple there. I was then pregnant, and my tendency to throw up on the road was higher than normal, which led to frequent stops on the highway. One such unscheduled stop found us near a board that said, ‘Wai – 10Km’. My father-in-law suddenly remembered a visit he had made to the area almost half a century ago, on his first job in the PWD. “There is a river there, and lots of temples” he said, and we decided to take the turn and see if they were still there. The river turned out to be almost completely dry... and what was left of it, extremely dirty... but the promise of temples was true. The whole riverbank was dotted with temples of all shapes and sizes, and there were also tiny shrines on the bed of the now-dried-up river, which obviously would disappear when the river filled up in the monsoons. I made a second trip to Wai some years later, but the river was just the same. The te...