Jammed clutch sliding the motorcycle on a steep incline towards a fatal cliff was a sure recipe to skipping heart-beats!
Distance traveled: 220 kms
Ride time: approximately 9 hours
Total time (w/ breaks): 11 hours
Health check: Brains unable to decipher which body part is more sore 😉
Mental check: Mesmerized
Motorcycle check: Evaded a mishap
We departed from the romantic and yet terror-prone Srinagar at about 8:30am with our destination set to the war-prone Kargil. The initial 1.5 hours of covering only 37 kms (23 miles) village riding gave us a true taste of ruthless truck drivers and shuttle SUVs having absolute disregard for the safety and even lives of 2-wheelers and pedestrians. Apart from not giving way, they would double up on a single lane road in the wrong side throwing off your judgement! Good experience in the inner roads before getting on to tougher terrains.
After a quick tea and bio break, the beauty of this heaven started on the way to Sonmarg. What a grandeur majesty of unimaginably high mountains and rivers! 
The starkly contrasted mountains with lush green landscapes were next to an extremely high peak and behind those would be a snow-clad mountain with melting ice portrayed as waterfalls – even if an artist paints this picture, it would seem an unreal exaggeration of natural beauty. Grand Canyon doesn’t seem grand anymore!
The Ride was quite balanced with a tough adventure to Zoji La Pass! Most of this pass is rough dusty gravels with dirt and water streams and constant inclines and declines with twisty turns. A lot of trucks, cargo vans and passenger transport vehicles were getting constantly stuck to climb these rough land-slided patches. 
Drivers would floor the accelerator to move truck a foot or two and their helpers would keep putting large stones right behind the rear wheel to prevent slippage.
We too had our fair share of quite a dangerous experience of our lives. While climbing the steep inclines on the sliding gravels, our motorcycle’s clutch got jammed. I didn’t know what was happening, but the motorcycle felt like it had given up all its horses and didn’t want to climb any further. None of my effort to lock the front brake helped as the tires kept slipping away in the back on this steep incline. Worse part was that the truck in front of us was sliding backwards right on us and in the rear was a few feet before a drop of high 100s or even low 1000s feet of fall! My heart skipped several beats and I may not have taken breaths for a couple mins, but felt like eternity! I immediately asked Gopi to get off the bike and I was almost about to let it go to jump out towards the mountain side, when my 
fellow riders came to balance the bike and push it up on the side of that truck! What a sigh of relief… Mom’s prayers and the Padmavati ma (Goddess) picture she gave me to put on my tank bag definitely seemed to have intervened. After a few deep breaths and collecting our composure, had Gopi ride with Praveen to a safer place while I waited for the mechanic on the backup van with Bhuvan, our extremely supportive tail sweeper 🙂
The half an hour wait was just for a quick 1-min clutch release by the expert mechanic Imran. Post that, all the adrenaline rush in me made me a maniac kid in a theme park. I just took off like a pro dirt bike rider crossing through water streams on this unpaved rubble filled road for about half an hour before uniting with the gang at Zoji La Pass.
There were a couple other minor incidences – the Lucknowi doctor couple had a graceful fall underestimating the depth of a water-filled pothole; and one of the Singaporean kid Gab had a sliding fall underestimating the sharpness of the hairpin bend twisties. No one was hurt, just the bikes took a couple of scrapes.
Unpaved dirt riding experience continued for a while – imagine watching the motocross without in-air jumps and 360s, but going on for about 3 hours. This certainly is not for the weak of heart or mind! Our mindset, stamina and confidence keeps getting tested – we just keep riding along…
Finally then the nice and smoother tarmac with 60 kms of twisties for about 1.5 hours guided us to Kargil like a cherry on the top! Kargil is the place where the most recent India-Pakistan war was fought.
Hot shower, great Indo-Chinese dinner and comfortable beds at Hotel Royal Gasho was a perfect recipe for a total knock-out 6 hours of sleep!
Barely got internet connectivity to upload this blogpost, while struggling to upload some pictures.
Stay tuned for another adventurous day as we kick start en route to Leh at 8am.
