The villages along the way were quite different from what we had seen in Ladakh. Himachel Pradesh is better connected to the main part of India, and buildings are constructed using modern techniques.
The road goes down a long valley and then over a small pass 30 kilometers (20 miles)north of Manali. The pass was under 4000 meters (13,000 feet) and not snow covered. There were a few muddy spots on the climb up the switchbacks, but our driver knew how to keep his car moving and made it to the top.
And then we stopped. At least 200 cars and trucks were waiting at the edge of a huge landslide that had come down in the night. No one was getting through.
The Indian army and road crew were hard at work and everyone was confident they would reopen the road shortly. They blasted several large boulders and used a giant bulldozer to plow a roadway through the mud. It wasn't pretty, but several dozen cars finally got through in the uphill direction, which was getting priority over us.
But the hill kept sliding. Some of the slides were minor, and a few hits by the bulldozer cleared them up. One jeep got stuck in the mud, and the bulldozer finally pushed it through, with only minor damage to its rear bumper. But then another huge boulder fell onto the road right where the car had been stuck two minutes before. Back to the dynamite.
By this time we had been waiting for seven hours and daylight was running out. With a flight the following morning and connecting flights immediately after, retreat was not an option. And the next airport was in Leh, two days drive to the north.
So we called a war council. There was a trail of sorts that led down to the next switchback, which was safely below the slide. We could wait in hopes that the road would open, but that would mean hiking down in the dark if it did not.
We decided to walk. Our driver used his cell phone to call his boss in Manali and arrange another taxi to meet us at the lower switchback from the town an hour and a half away. (Our first driver would end up spending the night on the mountain.) We repacked our backpacks so that we could carry everything, with our guide leaving his own bag in the car so that he could help Marcia. In about forty minutes we were down just as twilight was fading.
We did not have to wait long until our new taxi arrived. We piled in and rode down into town. We had made it to Manali!
