That evening when Japan lost the match to Paraguay, there were two hearts that sank, apart from the many present in the Loftus Versfeld stadium. Mine, for my tiny Japanese connection, and Jazz’s (the new Honda Jazz X, to be precise), for the more obvious blood relation. And then? Then I had to take her out for a tiny tummy fill, spin her around a little and cruise her along the sleepy streets of Chandigarh to recharge her jazziness. And all this while, B B King accompanied me in the noble cause. After all, the Jazz and I were to be partners for four more days to come.
Welcome to my first travelogue, when Jazz and yours truly were lucky enough to flee from the scorching Delhi heat and spend a quiet weekend in Tirthan Valley, a popular fishing getaway in the Kullu valley. The next morning, we shook the previous night’s gloom off our minds and were ready to swipe another 300 km to see what heaven’s footsteps looked like.
The drive until Chandigarh was quite smooth, if we discount the Delhi traffic and the Karnal bypass bustle, that is. The 260 km that we had covered so far were far from tiring thanks to the lovely green farms along the way and an excellent inter-state highway. With the new USB port in the Jazz X, King then elaborated upon his ‘three o’clock blues’ while we tried to cheer him up with flavoured lassi and other Punjabi delicacies.
Chandigarh to Ropar was an easy route. However, a few kilometres down that road and we were upon the work on a proposed four-lane highway for which the existing two-lane one had been dug up. Now all the cars had to suck their breath in and share the space with lumbering lorries. This was also the time for variegated vernacular poetry on the backsides of those lorries, musical power horns and the Jazz to surreptitiously transform into ‘Jajj’ in Punjab!
As we took the turn towards Manali, the road shrank to a single-lane winding one, where oncoming traffic played hide-and-seek and your feet got that extra exercise required in accomplishing an uphill task. The road did not spell a success story either. It bore all the marks of an honest attempt at laying a motorable strip through those finely cut hillocks, but quite forgotten. Rubble, weather-beaten stones, stray animals and a 43-degree steep ascent were enough to scare the living daylights out of a rookie F1 driver. If you were lucky, you could see the drivers of transport buses feed monkeys at the end of a blind curve. Not just that, the view outside the window was just too tempting for you not to pull over to a side, hunt for your camera under that heap of luggage and capture a few candid shots of nature casting her majestic spell on you. By the way, fuel-filling opportunities were not that frequent and the Jazz gave us a good glimpse of her diet-conscious self. 15 kms to a litre is a rather impressive figure.
