We wrapped up quickly and loaded everything on the bike and moved towards the start of the Pangong Lake as we were staying at the mid of the Pangong Lake in some village.
According to our plan, we had to leave Pangong for Leh around 12 PM but since the weather was very bad so we had to change it to 9 AM. That means we had only one hour to move around and capture memories :-). But that was enough....
Now it was the time to fill our belly with some food, so I came back to Rancho cafe and ordered Paratha and Fried rice meanwhile others were busy in clicking.
I aslo asked few locals about the weather and they said there is some snow in Changla, I was little bit scared because I did want to get stuck in snow and driving is quite difficult in snow. Initial few minutes in snow is the happiest moment and struggle starts afterwards, with this feeling we had our breakfast and moved ahead.
With just one stop in between we reached out just below Changla Pass in just 2 hrs, the place where we stopped was very beautiful, it was a straight road, ups and downs between the two big mountains.
In the pics you would have noticed the clouds on the top of the mountains, We had to cross those mountains :D. With the feeling of adventure we moved ahead on our way, and it started raining very slowly after just few minutes, but we continued. Rain got converted into frozen pearls :D, it was coming down to the roads like pearls then the feeling was so awesome because it was our first experience with these rains.
But somewhere down the corners of the heart, the feeling of getting stuck in between was also there, we kept moving. We had to move towards the strip inclined, poor Royal Enfield was also struggling :P with that inclined part. Suddenly snowfall started slowly, I asked one driver "is it safe to move ahead?"he replied yes, go the changla top and then stop, here you will get stuck.
I was driving alone in the front and rest two bikes were following me, snow started coming down heavily, we were riding like anything in those dirty inclined and stones. With that force of freezing breeze and heavy snow, the visibility was very less road were clear so we were moving very fast. After 20 mins of driving in that snow I saw the post of Changla, it was one of the happiest moment of my life :-).
I reached there first and parked my bike and when I looked myself and bike, it was scary feeling as I was completely white covered with snow and my bike too. I took shelter in one of the ARMY garage which was just beside the road, then Shashank came inside the garage with his bike along with Praveen, meanwhile I also brought my bike inside. Mannu came little bit late as he had to go behind the seat and Kaushik took the command on bike because of freezing temperature. Finally we were inside, shivering with cold but safe.
We removed all the snow from jackets, bags etc and started enjoying the snowfall. It was heavily coming down and covered all Changla in just few minutes. We made few videos during the snowfall with our jokes :P.
Snow was continued for 1 hours very heavily, so roads were completely covered with that but after some time it started coming down slowly. That moment brought smile on all our faces, slowly sunshine was there and we all came out and started throwing snow ball on each other :P. We were the happiest guys of the world not because we saw so much of snow because we survived in that situation and happiness of watching sun coming out :-).
Within minutes after sunshine, roads were completely clear. The feeling was like watching a magic show, suddenly all snow was gone.
We forgot our pain and playing with the snow and then moved ahead towards Leh. Again the bad road took our time but somehow crossed and reached Karu check post by 3 PM.
While going to Leh from Karu, there was a landslide on the road and ARMY JCB was removing all the stones from there, we stopped there for few minutes and then accelerated our bikes to reach directly to the hotel. The same hotel was there in which we stayed initially "Sangto Green".
This time our room was different, it was a big hall with 5 cozy beds :).
We were so tired because of all adventure we had that we were being lazy to go out for dinner, but we went and went to one of the very famous restaurants i.e. Lamayuru Restaurant. The food was so awesome and we ate till neck.
We came back to hotel and it was around 9 PM. We saw all the videos of snow storm and made some jokes, laughed and then slept.
This was the most adventurous day of our trip and finally ninth day ended with the proud feeling of visiting world's highest salt water lake.
Next Day
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