Day 2: TOW Shimla

DAY 2 : 19th November
All the talk the night before meant nothing, the 5 am departure time turned into 7:30 am. More than 250 km to travel in hilly region coupled with sightseeing shimla, Manali by end of day was a distant dream.
We had stayed around 50 km away from shimla, at a place called Solan. The thinking was that shimla(Kufri) would take an hour and a half to reach and 2 hours for sightseeing. But we reached kufri at 10:30 am although we did have breakfast on the way.
I had always imagined shimla to be cool and pleasant. But the season being what it was, shimla turned out to be hot and dusty. We rented horses to go up the hill of kufri, when we reached there it was just another undeveloped but heavily commercialized tourist spot with nothing to visit. Though I have heard when it snows in kufri, its usually a pleasant sight. But with no snow in sight, the visit to shimla was turning out to be boring. But the excitement of seeing apple gardens and the presence of yaks just made our day.
There were yaks on the hill. So that we could sit upon them get photos taken. The Yak owner had cowboy hats and a fake gun to pose for photos.
Everyone of us sat on the Yak and posed for the photos as bandits. It was immense fun.

Then from there we walked down to the apple gardens. We chit chatted there and returned back to the top of hill from where we took horse back to the Taxi. By this time it was already around 1 o clock and we left shimla for Manali.
But considering that we had left Shimla at 1 pm, we thought we will stay at Mandi instead of Manali, 100 kms behind manali. We stopped there early at around 8 pm. The hotel was actually a function hall turned motel. The rooms were quite big and comfortable and cheap.
The hotel was a bit outside the city. So after settling into room, we went for a walk towards city. The hotel was on the banks of a river and the city was on the other side. So we went till the bridge across the river which connected the city and came back. Then we had lots of food in the same hotel. Akash and few others also drank vodka.
We had taken 2 rooms, 1 with 4 beds and the other with 2. Adarsh and sunil slept in the 2 bed room and rest of us slept in 4 beds room.