Hampta pass 27Sep - 2Oct 2014

The post is my travelogue to a adventurous trek Hampta pass which I completed with my wife (madhura) and few fellow trekkers from  27 Sep - 2 Oct 2014. Madhura and I started our journey from pune to reach manali on friday and acclimatized 1 full day on friday in manali. Oh Ya! we took some trekking essentials like trekking poles, gloves, creams/lotions etc and then had a great lunch at Chop Sticks to return back to hotel to again acclimatize on lavish king size beds :-).

Day 1 (27 Sep 2014 Saturday):

We woke up early morning and checked our trekking bags. We had packed our clothes (undergarments/T-shirt/jackets) in daywise plastic bags "extremely well organised". So there was nothing to do than checking again and calculating/ on where should we put our previous days shopping.Around 10AM after breakfast we went to the reporting spot to find sanjeev thakur (Trek leader) and bobby. Sanjeev greeted us and informed that 2 of our fellow trekkers Bharath (will reach at 12) and saurav(will reach at 1) and he has asked pranjal and sanjay (Couple) to wait in hotel as we as a group are stuck ! The weather was pretty hot and 4 of us decided to go and sit in van vihar than sitting outside hotel rudra. We 4 sat for a Hour chitchatting and doing random things inside the park watching the river Beas. Below you can see a photo madhura took with a rabbit (10Rs).

 Around 12pm sanjay and pranjal came in the park to join the waiting trekkers. Now 6 of us continued doing random things for some more time. Around 1PM when there were no sign of bharath and saurav we decided to make a call to them. Bharath was half hour distance and sourav was in Mandi (3 hours distance). Looking at the situation sanjeev got tensed and asked our opinion on should we wait for sourav. the waiters unanimously agreed to wait till 3 and decided to fill our stomach as we were hungry by that time. After we placed our lunch order, bharath arrived at the hotel and joined the lunch. After the lunch (3PM) we decided to move to Trek The Himalayas office to dump our extra bags and wait till saurav reaches manali. Thanks to Sanjay we did the smart thing of offloading our extra clothes. We only took 2 trekking pairs, 2 night pairs of clothes, rain jacket, 2 pullovers, 4 pair of undergarments, 1 pair of thermals , 4-5 socks and floaters. It was around 3:30pm when Saurav arrived in manali and taking him we started our journey to chika. Going to chika is a Ghat with 44 hairpin bends going from 6000ft  to 10000 ft. Along the road we all talked and clicked some photographs along the way. Finally, you landup at a hydro power plant (Jobri) and from this place your actual trek begins.