Featured Post

Day 16, 5 July, Leh to Pangong Tso..

Today, we started off at 8 am from Leh . Soon, we passed by Shay and Thiksey Gonpas . We reached Karu at around 9.15 am. Karu is 40 Kms ...

Tuesday, August 18, 2009

Day 21-22, 10 July - 11 July, Kalka - Pune.. Back home

On 10 July, we had to board into the train at Kalka. But, first we had to pack our bike before loading it into the luggage car. Fortunately, we could find some people at the station who packed our bike for 100 Rs. I remembered, same thing was charged 300 Rs in Pune.
Then, I booked the bike and got it loaded from a railway person.
Our back journey started at 10.10 am from Kalka. We were lucky that it started raining just after we reached the station.
Next day, we reached Mumbai at around 3.30 pm without much trouble. At station, the luggage dept. officer noticed that there was no booking information marked on the bike. So, he said that he could not transfer the bike to me and he would have to call up the Kalka station to confirm. Although I had the receipt and vehicle documents, he wanted to earn some money out of it. A typical example of bureaucracy in India. However, I went to his senior officer and told him the story and to my surprise he immediately came with me and asked the in charge person to transfer my bike to me as I had valid receipt with me. This was the other face of our bureaucracy :)

One more thing was about the porters working under that person. They were almost trying to scare me by saying that nothing can be done about my case. But, if I would give him 600 Rs., he would arrange the things for me. It was the most funniest at the same time a ridiculous thing for me. Finally, I had to get the octroi stamp from the concerned officer. She helped me telling that I would have to write an application stating that I had carried my bike for trip. So, I need not have to pay the octroi. It took me one and half our to resolve this problem.

Thus, eventually, we got the bike and started our journey back to Pune.
Our journey to Pune was nice other than the raining for most of the time.
Actually, it was a big trouble especially at night when there was merely some visibility.

End of the day, we were at home at around 10 pm while our dream trip came to an memorable end. We enjoyed it like never before. It was a journey of a place not less than heaven.

5 comments:

  1. very nice experience it must have been, i am looking forward to my trip to dalhousie in the month of November !

    thanks Suraj for this beautiful post B-)

    ReplyDelete
  2. It's nothing less than lifetime experience.. Thanks for reading it till end :)

    ReplyDelete
  3. Very nice..

    i also covered this route in Sep 2009.. But i went via Manali and came back via Srinagar.. Also i started biking from Pune itself...

    ReplyDelete
  4. Thanks for the appreciation!! We were also initially thinking to do it on bike to and fro from Pune but eventually had to drop the plan due to time constraints..

    ReplyDelete