Day 2

Day 2 – June 13:

Jalandar – Udhampur

Stay: Hotel Vishal (best avoided)

We took our sweet time to get ready and start riding. The road initially is good just after Jalandar, but gets bad after. There was also a jam because a car had broken down. Here we took a detour and did some offroading to cross it. After covering some more distance we saw some rain threatening clouds ahead and we covered our bags and ourselves, though it turned out that it was unnecessary. The plan for the day was to skip Jammu and ride till Patnitop. We crossed into Himachal in between for a few Kms and then back into Punjab. Just before entering J&K, the road is, or let me just say there is no road at all, and there is huge line of trucks which you have to cross. Now we had entered the state of our journey. I had a vague idea of the route which we had to take to bypass Jammu. After some enquiries we got to know that we had to take a right after Samba. Before reaching Samba, the inevitable thing happened. I had a flat tyre. Luckily a puncture shop was nearby, but he was too busy in fixing a truck tyre. So we removed my bike’s tyre and gave it to him to fix it. Puncture fixed, but he was still in no mood to put the tyre back. So we did it. I tested the brakes and they were still too loose. Tightened it to my liking and we started. Just after taking the right after Samba, my bike started acting weird. It would go to a maximum of 50 kmph. We stopped near a puncture guy again and told him our problem. Meanwhile Abhisekh had gone ahead and it was just Rahul and I. The puncture guy found out that the brake shoe casing on the rear wheel was too hot and it had turned from a silvery colour to light golden due to overheating. Spent 30 minutes to let the brakes cool down then he fixed the tyre again. My bike was working fine now. I still don’t know what the problem was. If I had tuned the brakes too hard I would feel it while driving, but the brakes were fine. All this wasted more than 1 hour as a whole.

Anyways moved ahead, met Abhisekh, explained him what had happened. Now we started riding in mountains for the first time on this trip. We were faced with high speed cross winds and our speeds were reduced to 20-30 kmph. The worst was while crossing a bridge, felt like the wind would push us from the bridge. Anyways, time wastage due to puncture and slow speed later meant that we decided to stay in Udhampur instead of Patnitop. The decision seemed wise as it started raining as we entered Udhampur and it was getting dark. Next day we ride to the Kashmir valley.

Find the pics here.