Saturday 2nd August, Udaipur to Shour

Good morning, Udaipur.

Started with a little tarmac but it was just to tease. The rest of the day was rocky, sandy, windy, bumpy, tiring.

It’s nice to see trees again after the almost total absence in Spiti.

The valley narrowed and was probably quite pretty but it was a full time job keeping the bike going in the right direction so I didn’t enjoy the scenery as much as I would have liked.

Very little traffic, just a vehicle every twenty minutes or so. It was mainly shared-jeeps full of locals or smallish trucks carrying produce from further up the valley.

I started looking for somewhere to sleep – it was promising to be a bivouac (a somewhat hungry one since all I’d had for lunch were some two-day-old very-shaken-not-stirred samosas). A village came into view spread over the hillside a couple of kilometres ahead. I had a place to sleep picked out, at the side of the road but somewhat protected by a pile of roadmaker’s rocks, but decided to press on to the village, Shour. A good decision: the Pangi Forest Rest House is empty.

In the register, I noticed a man from Ireland had stayed the previous night. It must be the cyclist I’d met at the internet shop in Keylong two days earlier. He planned to ride to Killar, then over the Sach Pass to Dharamshala.

This valley doesn’t see many Westerners. I wonder what the odds are of two cyclists passing through on consecutive days?

Old style water heating…make sure the switch is off, push the wires into the plug holes, place the exposed ‘heating element’ wire into the bucket, remove hands, turn on the switch. Do not put your hand into the bucket to test the water temperature with the power on!

46.3 km, 7.5 kph, 1008 km to date