We took an awesome and memorable 10 day road trip (17th May 2019 - 27th May 2019) from Chandigarh to Amritsar via Himachal Pradesh. These are the notes taken every night from that vacation. I will publish them one day at a time for the next 10 days.
18th May 2019 Day 2 :
The hotel we stayed over last night had a huge window and it opened towards a government school. As I was mentioned yesterday the infrastructure at Chandigarh is amazing. Here is a picture of that school.
I haven't seen such open spaces in some of the privately funded schools of Bangalore, which charge a high fee. The first and the only planned city of India is something to be proud of and needs to be emulated across.
The objective for today was to visit Rock Garden and then reach Mandi before sunset. That would have given us ample rest before we drive to Kulu via Prashar Lake. After breakfast we landed in Rock Garden and it is one of the most amazing places we have seen in India. It was very clean and has amazing collection of things made from rocks. It is one man's creation (Nek Chand) and I can only imagine what would have happened to him had he not found some support from a city like Chandigarh. The garden is world class. It could be a bit more well maintained (the signs and audio guides are missing.) And has the potential of becoming a much more popular tourist spot.
After rock garden, we decided against visiting the lake in Chandigarh and drove towards Kirtarpur Sahib. Pradeep (our zoomcar ground executive) had suggested that if we drive towards Mandi then that's the city from which we should cross over to Himachal, as we would easily spot the RTO office of Himachal where we will have to pay the road tax.
On the way to Kirtarpur Sahib it was almost time for lunch. We did Google around a bit and figured that there are a lot of Gurudwaras in Anandpur Sahib. It adds a bit of drive for us but then we can see a nice Gurudwara, have Prasad in Langar. We also saw that there is a highly reviewed and rated museum called Virasat-e-Khalsa. We visited Gurudwara Kila Sri Anandgarh Sahib and had our lunch over in langar. Post that we visited Virasat-e-Khalsa which is an amazing museum. The entry is free and the structure is clean and has an imposing presence. The exhibits inside were very well maintained and planned. We ended up spending a good amount of time in these 2 places. And that meant we were going to be driving late.
We started from this place around 4.15 PM and the question in our head was, do we want to visit Bhakra dam as it could be a life time experience. We decided against it as it would have added a couple of hours of drive time and another hour of visiting time.We wouldn't have made there during the sunny hours and visit would have been out of question.
We started to drive towards Mandi. On the way we had dinner around 7 pm. It was good chapati (got them after 2 days as all we got in Chandigarh was tandoori rotis) with dal and Potatoes.
We kept driving and finally halted for night in a Oyo around 10 kms before Mandi.
We want to visit Prashar Lake and land in Kulu by sunset tomorrow. Let's see how it pans out.
Signing off day 2
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