Dangerous road, not!
Road, mountain ,cliff, river: somewhere on the way from Himachal Pradesh to Jammu and Kashmir.
We left Killar after the I-day celebrations at around three in the afternoon. We had been informed that the road we were planning on taking towards Keylong had been blocked for some time now due to a landslide and the only option(other than taking the road back through Sach Pass) was to go towards Jammu and Kashmir; and as it turned out this was one experience we wouldn't mind doing all over again.
The roads started normally enough with just mud and rocks and soon we were crossing the Himachal Pradesh checkpost. As mountain roads do, these roads too climbed up, then would come down to the valleys before going back up again; that is until the mountain face becomes a cliff and the road is something that has been chipped off this, and sometimes scooped out from the rock face, not to mention the river down below is probably a thousand feet away and there are small streams and water falls we have to go through on the road. In reality it was not as dangerous as it may sound or look in the photographs but it was one traffic-free road :) as we did not come across any other vehicle on the cliffs.
The late start meant that the next town of Ghulabgarh was still quite a distance away in the evening; at close to six we were at a small village named Tiyari; where one shopkeeper(the only one around) had a battery operated dish TV with the batteries being charged with a couple of solar panels on the roof. We camped here on the roof just to make use of the tent we had but once it was dark, all we could hear was the sound of a flowing river far below with a starlit sky above.
Starting late the next morning, we followed the kuchcha roads to Ghulabgarh after which started the phukkah roads with a few patches of bad roads. We had our lunch at Ghulabgarh and also some apples( at Rs.1/2 each). There was more adventure ahead on this day as we tried to take a shortcut from Kishtwar to Anantnag, but more on that later; we ended up spending the night back in Kishtwar with armed men guarding the gates.
Part of 'The Trip/2007', Aug/Sep/Oct/Nov.