Ladakh Marathon Trip - Day 1

• There we start to this really long awaited trip, darn tired with all the back and forth packing the previous night left home at 6:40 to join rest of the party at Kotheguda to take a cab for a 9:10 flight to Delhi along with Shiv and Madhuri.
• Met up with other runners Padma, Kiran, Santhoshi, Gupta at the hyderabad airport gathered seats together for both legs, quickly checked in our baggage was in a hurry to treat our taste buds
• With all the overly hyped up idli factory we reach airport only to see that those guys are not ready with breakfast even at 8:30 AM, quickly munched some breakfast and we were on the last call for boarding onto Delhi aircraft
• With a changeover at Delhi, connecting flight was at 1:20 PM, we were still munching on our lunch until 1:10, we heard our names being called out and final call out for boarding srinagar flight, we hurried to the gate 18, only to realize that shiv had his security tag being not stamped, he quickly got it stamped in a nearby counter and soon we embark our next flight to Srinagar
• We have been hearing about our lone stranded uday kiran, with all his updates from srinagar airport, who was soon accompanied by Devyani and aashish who had flown in to srinagar at different times.
• While we were doing all this, our secret worked balaji managed to strike a deal with a local driver by his arriving a day early, to and fro Leh, also had set up with accommodation at Srinagar
• With quite a few selfies clicked we set out of the airport to hop onto the van set up by our balaji, soon enough to be dropped at the hotel, quickly after a short refreshment we set out to visit Dal Lake

 

• Its around 6 PM and feels like it's still 3 PM, with the hopes for some more daylight we set out for a walk to dal lake which is quite 3.5 k walk from our hotel
• With few snaps around some random hanging bridge along the route, we kept walking only to be guided by our guide Balaji, luring in Aashish and kiran for a tea, for a long time. It took them close to 3k walk to realize that he was really luring them ;) finally got us near to ghat2 of dhal lake where we sneaked in into a restaurant
• With the famous team's behaviour at restaurant, we storm one of the restaurant and got into action for some aalo parantha and elachi tea, quick enough to some of our taste buds to rest
• Our plan was to take the shikara boat to get an hours ride  in the dal lake, for which our negotiator Mr balaji was thrusted responsibility :) we ended up for an awesome deal ;) finally taking 3 boats and slowly we go around the lake with rowers going at their own sweet pace

 

• With some snaps and few rounds of anthakshari, with the announced winner Uday who had the ability to prove others that he wasn’t really making up songs, we sneaked through along some of the boat houses and end our hours ride by the time it was getting dark
• After a quick 20 minute walk along the lake to discover the starting point for an awesome trekking point that balaji had tried the previous day we set out for dinner
• As usual hyderabad runners with their so famour trait of attacking onto the dishes we emptied quite a lot of food, good enough for 2 days , slowly walk back to our hotel.

 

• A day nicely spent in the company of fellow runners, resting enough to sneak out at 5 AM tomorrow.