Time has always been of great interest to me. Once I started working with developers around the world, time-zones became much more important. GMT is naturally the reference to any time zone. Like IST is +5.5GMT.

So Greenwich as soon as my friend told me about it. I was all in. Greenwich has the Royal Observatory overlooking river Thames on a hill in Greenwich Park. prime meridian (longitude 0, check the picture below) passes through Royal Observatory. It’s from here ( prime meridian, Greenwich) the time is measured. You can see the clock running GMT above. If you have a smart phone then start plain vanilla GPS app and check UTC time. It’s almost equal to GMT. The difference between UTC and GMT is below 0.9 seconds. GMT is also called as Universal Time (UT).
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It wasn’t well planned. I got my visa through fast track process and four days from then I was in London. Only thing that I researched well was mobile data connection. During my research I settled on Huchison 3 data only plan. I paid £20 for SIM and 1GB. But my Nexus One refused to get onto the network (local Galaxy SII was able to get 3G connection). I tried everything and then got an O2 connection. Its pathetic No 3G, its hardly on Edge, GPRS is patchy. Call rates (both international and local) are high. I got Lebra for my cousin, local and international calls are dead cheap and also free internet till month end. That aside I was able to get in touch with the world. That resulted in meeting various interesting people. I will reserve it for another detailed post. Enjoy the pictures from central London as of now.

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This wasn’t the most beautiful but this was the most tiring one :) I (we) never expected riding on regular highways would be so tiring, Well our assumptions were wrong. The roads weren’t exactly like highways we had assumed. It was two way and there was heavy truck traffic. We were also riding in ghat section which means it needed high concentration. I had also not recovered from tiredness of mountain rides. So I was getting tired very often and was affecting our mileage.

Except for first few hundred kilometers the rest was very dry too. We weren’t enjoying the ride. We cut short our ride and ended the ride in Ambala. We were out of mountains and now in hot and humid North India.

Actually I didn’t even click much pictures that day. All we did was riding and riding. We didn’t do much but felt like we didn a thousand kilometer.

Next few days we roamed across Rajasthan. Wait for those stories.

This is one of our toughest rides not just physically but psychologically too. But I should also say it was the best and most beautiful track to ride on. This post is going to be long with lots of pictures. Fill your coffee mug.

When we reached Manali it was already very cold. Upon that we had a bad news waiting for us. Roads to Rohtang was closed due to heavy snowing. People around were not very hopeful about next day too :(
We woke up early next day but it was very very cold. We couldn’t move out until 8. None of us had experience in riding in cold weather. So I wore five layers of clothings and had heavy breakfast before actually starting.

Rohtang is just 57kms from Manali. Its just the nature of the road and weather makes it difficult to reach. To our luck it had not snowed much last night and we had bright sun early in the morning. Just 7/8 kilometers in to the ride, we could see visible changes in our surroundings.

Bright sun, blue skies and clear roads. We were enjoying our roads. I was not really sure about the weather, so started clicking from the word go.
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We were already a day behind the schedule and were really slow against our expected average speed. Both my friends had limited number of leaves. They had planned everything. But then the story of Manikaran amazed both of my co-riders. I dint have a fixed plan, I had whole month at my disposal. I agreed to their plan.

Next day morning we left around seven in the morning. It was cold. I was wearing three layers of clothing (including thermal) and a jacket. I realized it was not enough for November. Once we started riding cold started to hurt my skin around neck. So I had to shrug to reduce the expose.

But the route to Manikaran was beautiful. We forgot about everything started enjoy it. We were riding really slow. It took us one and half hours for 45kms.
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