Day 8 - Rest day in Leh

13th July 2008

Today was rest day for most of us and the others were to go on a rafting ride from Chilling to Nimmu route.

Purvesh, Amit, Vishal (builder), Shailesh and Nikhil were the brave warriors who were to go for rafting. They left at around 9am from the hotel; I and Deepak went out to find some good massage parlor.

We found one who asked us to come back at 11am and the cost was 700 bucks anyways we paid him the advance and went back at 11am for the massage. The massage was nice and was for around 80 odd minutes after which my body was relaxed.

We went back to the hotel and had a nice time relaxing for some time until lunch when we went to the Himalaya hotel and had a great lunch and came back to the hotel again.

Abhijit and Deepak decided to roam around Leh and me and Saurabh decided to stay back. We did some photography of the snow covered peaks surrounding Leh as the weather was clear today with the sun. The snow covered peaks looked amazing.

We went into our rooms and slept for sometime before the warriors returned with their tales of rafting in the rapids and jumping into the freezing waters at the end to have a nice floating experience! Deepak and Abhijit too returned soon after their Leh adventure.

We all then decided to get fresh and go out for shopping and stuff here. We left the hotel at around 7.30pm and went around Leh market on foot looking at stuff we could buy or just walking around. We purchased some KhardungLa t-shirts which had nicely embroidered stuff on the front and we got a good deal. Others purchased gloves and stuff.

Amit tried to get his bike repaired – remember the lost key at Pang but he was unsuccessful to do it finally was asked by the mechanic to come next day early morning to drill a hole in the petrol tank – the only way to fill in the fuel for the next leg of the journey.

Shopping done we returned back to our favorite hotel Himalaya for a great dinner followed by discussions and came back to the hotel and had a great session of cards before falling asleep.

Tomorrow we were to leave for Kargil from Leh Enroute to Srinagar the next leg of our journey.

A rest day thus ended with us waiting for the next day to ride on!