Delhi - Auli Bike Tour.

It had been 3 months gap since we did our last tour; we missed our planned HKD trek and a bike tour in december '07, So we were eagerly looking for next oppurtunity to hit road. Finally the we decided on dates and the destination of our next tour, and thankfully everybody in team had time!

Destination: Auli (~3000 meters above sea)

Dates : 5th - 8th jan 2008
Team : Same old good 3 bikers. Sripurna (On P150),
Jay (On CBZ exterme), and me (On P180)

Route : Gaziabad - Merrut - Roorkee - Haridwar - Rishikesh - Rudraprayg - chamoli -

joshimath - Auli.

Round Trip : 1060 km.

Highways : Only NH58. Caught NH58 from gaziabad and left it at joshimath.

DAY - 1

As Always we started early in the morning around 4 am from Noida and within few minutes we were on NH58, and started crusing towards merrut. NH58 being a familiar higway allowed us to run fast till merrut after which we had to ride more carefully because of the bullock carts and tractors carrying sugarcane, at these guys remain invisible until they are just few feets away from you!
Apart from these slow moving carts, NH58 is a no problem highway. We reached rishikesh in about 6 hours and then headed towards badrinath. We were at Rudrapryag at about 7pm; we did not want to ride at night in hills, so we called the day off and halted at rudraprayag.

DAY - 2

Day 2 begun at 10:00 am in morning, and its gonna be a short ride of about 120km till joshimath. This road is smooooooth for most of this strech; except for about 30km before karnprayag, after karnprayag again smooth curves.

When we touched johimath at about 4 in the evening it was coloudy there and was raining a little bit, this was both good and bad situation for us. Bad because we could not capture sunset glow on snow covered peaks because of clouds and Good because rain means possible snow fall at auli :)

Just clicked few macros in joshimath and headed towards Auli (a brave decision!!!).

Auli is just 16km from, our excitement had no limit because in few minutes there will be snow everywhere :)

Shortly we saw small patches of snow.. wow!!! that is what we were waiting for. I had never seen snow before this, so just pulled
my bike off the road, took my gloves off and grabbed handful of snow... to get a feel of it.... So far so good; everything was going according to the plan. Purna and jay were ahead of me by a kilometer to two so without wasting much time i started the engine again and started moving.

As i moved along, the amount of snow on road started growing so was my excitement. As i applied brakes to take a shot, the bike skidded but fortunately by small amount, so this is called black ice! good good..first encounter with black ice also. After moving for just 100-200 meters more the real fun started, there was a chocolate colored mixture of mud and snow ahead on whole road.

I tried crossing this section slowly but no luck this time, now the bike was skiding crazily even wihtout applying brakes. It was moving right, left and even back but it was'nt moving ahead :( Some people who were njoying their booze and snow fight saw me struggling, and pushed my bike out of that mess! hmm now i could see jay and purna just 50 meters ahead and they were also struggling :)

Purna was the first one to fall down on road, next was my turn, and finally jay also touched down. Bikes were barely moving forward, so finally we made a wise decision to go back to johismath and come back to auli next day by ropeway.

DAY3

Woke up around 6am in the morning, sky was clear no clouds, Picked up my cam and went out to capture sunrise glow on peaks. good luck this time, i was able to capture some beautiful sunrise shots.

Auli Ropeway is 4km long (The longest in India) and it accends

600m. First ropeway car leaves johimath at 9:45 in morning, and obviously we were in the first car :)

Picture on left side gives a nice bird's eye view of the road on which we strugguled previous day, Looking at amount of snow on road now we know that we made really a wise decision yesterday to return back.

In about 15 minutes we were at auli, hired show boots for 50 buks, filled our bellies with maggi and now our feet were in 1.5 feet snow!! welcome to auli.... nothing but snow everywhere....

It was a clear sunny day, pleasent weather... and loads of snow. We got a clear view of NandaDevi and many other peaks from here... Auli is a ski resort so how can we go without skiing, again this was my first time with skiing But nothing wrong in trying it.. The instructor taught me how to skii, i tried few times.. hmm it seems its not a tough job, soon the instructor gave me green flag to skii on slope :) I started off well i was more than happy, before i could think anything else i banged in people njoying their tea, skiing is not easy i learnt :)

We stayed at auli till 3pm and then took the ropeway car back to johimath. We started our return journey at 5pm from johimath and reached rudraprayag around 11 at night. End of day 3.

DAY4

Nothing much, ride back from rudraprayag to Noida.