Jim Finnel
Fallen Cannabis Warrior & Ex News Moderator
Cannabis grows wild in Manali but it was the excellent trout curry that Rhymer Rigby was unable to resist.
Wild marijuana is so prevalent around Manali that the whole town smells like a hippy's pocket. We had been driving the 25 miles from Kulu Airport to Manali and I had found myself fascinated by the roadside plants. There was something odd about them, but I couldn't quite make it out in the white-knuckle blur that is any Indian taxi ride. Then, as we slowed to enter Manali, it all became clear. Cannabis sativa is a native of these parts, and virtually every roadside weed really is, well, weed.
It is for this reason, and its extraordinary end-of-the-world location, that Manali was one of the original hippy Shangri-las. Since then it has grown considerably, but even now, 40 years after the Summer of Love, it's an agreeable, attractive little mountain town with a sort of India-meets-the-Wild-West feel.
What it doesn't feel like, though, is the Himalayas - with glacier-topped mountains looking down on lush, grassy valleys and pine forests, it's much more like the Alps or Rockies. For this reason, it often stands in for such "exotic" locations in Bollywood films.
Nor is Manali's climate, despite an altitude of 6,750 feet, quite what you might expect. At most latitudes, this would be a cold and desolate place. But here, close to the tropics, it is damp and shockingly fertile. The result is an extraordinary, Jurassic Park-like mix of alpine and tropical plants. Yuccas jostle with apple trees and huge mountain pines, enormous ferns fight it out with oversize rhododendrons, and forests swathe the slopes up to 12,000ft.
Manali is an outdoor paradise, and we had planned to go trekking. But shortly after we bought our tickets, my wife discovered she was pregnant. Although visiting India while in this state is perfectly OK, especially high above the threat of malaria in the Himalayas, going to serious altitude isn't.
The doctor had advised Jane to stay below 11,500ft, and we were in one of the few places in the world where this presented a real problem.
However, we found a trekking agency in town that said they could cater to our needs. So, the next day, I started out with a day hike in Solang to about 14,500ft while my wife lounged on the veranda of what I think was a very, very minor ski resort (so minor, apparently, that they use yaks instead of lifts).
It was an outstandingly beautiful walk, but hiking up 8,000 vertical feet and back in a day really isn't for those who find a few flights of stairs challenging.
That evening, with me barely able to walk, we ate in a restaurant called Johnson's, which offered a Euro-Indian menu. I'm not normally a fan of Western food in India. But this place grew virtually everything itself, and the flavours of both the Indian and foreign dishes were great.
My personal favourite was a trout curry served with home-made fern pickle. Both ambitious and delicious, it would have been a credit to British restaurants charging 10 times as much.
Our post-prandial stroll, though, was a washout. Take a brolly: the evening rain in Manali is proof that it is possible to get soaked to your underwear in less than a minute.
The following day, we wandered around town, looked at temples and visited the nearby village of Vashishat, where we had tea and cakes at a restaurant overlooking an enormous U-shaped valley with green walls and high, glaciated peaks.
It's was a gigantic view, a bit like Austria writ large, and even with nothing to give you a sense of scale, you somehow know that you were in the world's highest mountain range.
Our next walk was a little more ambitious. We were going trekking in one of the valleys just south of the town for three days. Indians take their hikes very seriously. Our £150 fee got us a guide, a cook and four porters for three days.
India is a strictly hierarchical place (a guide won't cook and a cook won't carry), so there is absolutely no point in trying to travel light. If you need a guide, you get six people. You can argue till you're blue in the face, but it will be to no avail, so you may as well enjoy being waited on hand and foot during your wilderness trek.
Our walk took us through the forests and into a landscape similar to that of the Scottish Highlands, but unimaginably bigger. The grassy hills were interspersed with flower meadows and strange little woodlands of twisted trees and giant boulders straight out of The Lord of the Rings.
On the second day, my wife was a little tired, so she let the guide and me disappear to climb some minor, unnamed peak that was probably higher than anything in Europe.
We'd just started our descent when we found ourselves staring down a herd of crazed water buffalo - not what you expect at these heights. We made a lot of noise. This made them angrier. We banged sticks. They got angrier and started pawing the ground. We gave up and scarpered. Luckily, water buffalo are stupid, and we gave them the slip by hiding behind a rock.
Then mist descended. This, I thought smugly, is why you take a guide and his entourage. Five minutes later my guide announced that he didn't know where he was either - though somehow it sounded so much more reassuring coming from him.
So we wandered around aimlessly in the high-altitude fog looking for something that looked familiar on a mountain where everything looked pretty similar even when it wasn't foggy.
After a couple of hours in the fog, we bumped into a goatherd who has lost his goats. We told him that we we'd lost our camp and that we had in fact seen some goats half an hour ago. He thanked us and, almost as an parting shot, added that he was pretty sure he'd seen some tents an hour ago, about three hills that way. Sure enough, 50 minutes later, we found our tents, with spiced chai waiting for us. I hope he found his goats.
The following day we hiked down, with my wife noting that, although she'd had fun and the views were splendid and the forests beautiful, "Trekking in the Himalayas for Pregnant Women" was unlikely to be a bestseller.
We grabbed a last trout curry at Johnson's and then drove to Shimla to stay at Chapslee Palace, a Raj summer house that hasn't changed (in any way whatsoever) since Edwardian times. Sitting by the cool, sunny lawn, eating cucumber sandwiches and drinking tea out of bone-china cups, the air perfumed by flowers rather than cannabis plants, we reflected that this was, perhaps, a more suitable place for a pregnant woman.
High in a Himalayan hippy haven
Wild marijuana is so prevalent around Manali that the whole town smells like a hippy's pocket. We had been driving the 25 miles from Kulu Airport to Manali and I had found myself fascinated by the roadside plants. There was something odd about them, but I couldn't quite make it out in the white-knuckle blur that is any Indian taxi ride. Then, as we slowed to enter Manali, it all became clear. Cannabis sativa is a native of these parts, and virtually every roadside weed really is, well, weed.
It is for this reason, and its extraordinary end-of-the-world location, that Manali was one of the original hippy Shangri-las. Since then it has grown considerably, but even now, 40 years after the Summer of Love, it's an agreeable, attractive little mountain town with a sort of India-meets-the-Wild-West feel.
What it doesn't feel like, though, is the Himalayas - with glacier-topped mountains looking down on lush, grassy valleys and pine forests, it's much more like the Alps or Rockies. For this reason, it often stands in for such "exotic" locations in Bollywood films.
Nor is Manali's climate, despite an altitude of 6,750 feet, quite what you might expect. At most latitudes, this would be a cold and desolate place. But here, close to the tropics, it is damp and shockingly fertile. The result is an extraordinary, Jurassic Park-like mix of alpine and tropical plants. Yuccas jostle with apple trees and huge mountain pines, enormous ferns fight it out with oversize rhododendrons, and forests swathe the slopes up to 12,000ft.
Manali is an outdoor paradise, and we had planned to go trekking. But shortly after we bought our tickets, my wife discovered she was pregnant. Although visiting India while in this state is perfectly OK, especially high above the threat of malaria in the Himalayas, going to serious altitude isn't.
The doctor had advised Jane to stay below 11,500ft, and we were in one of the few places in the world where this presented a real problem.
However, we found a trekking agency in town that said they could cater to our needs. So, the next day, I started out with a day hike in Solang to about 14,500ft while my wife lounged on the veranda of what I think was a very, very minor ski resort (so minor, apparently, that they use yaks instead of lifts).
It was an outstandingly beautiful walk, but hiking up 8,000 vertical feet and back in a day really isn't for those who find a few flights of stairs challenging.
That evening, with me barely able to walk, we ate in a restaurant called Johnson's, which offered a Euro-Indian menu. I'm not normally a fan of Western food in India. But this place grew virtually everything itself, and the flavours of both the Indian and foreign dishes were great.
My personal favourite was a trout curry served with home-made fern pickle. Both ambitious and delicious, it would have been a credit to British restaurants charging 10 times as much.
Our post-prandial stroll, though, was a washout. Take a brolly: the evening rain in Manali is proof that it is possible to get soaked to your underwear in less than a minute.
The following day, we wandered around town, looked at temples and visited the nearby village of Vashishat, where we had tea and cakes at a restaurant overlooking an enormous U-shaped valley with green walls and high, glaciated peaks.
It's was a gigantic view, a bit like Austria writ large, and even with nothing to give you a sense of scale, you somehow know that you were in the world's highest mountain range.
Our next walk was a little more ambitious. We were going trekking in one of the valleys just south of the town for three days. Indians take their hikes very seriously. Our £150 fee got us a guide, a cook and four porters for three days.
India is a strictly hierarchical place (a guide won't cook and a cook won't carry), so there is absolutely no point in trying to travel light. If you need a guide, you get six people. You can argue till you're blue in the face, but it will be to no avail, so you may as well enjoy being waited on hand and foot during your wilderness trek.
Our walk took us through the forests and into a landscape similar to that of the Scottish Highlands, but unimaginably bigger. The grassy hills were interspersed with flower meadows and strange little woodlands of twisted trees and giant boulders straight out of The Lord of the Rings.
On the second day, my wife was a little tired, so she let the guide and me disappear to climb some minor, unnamed peak that was probably higher than anything in Europe.
We'd just started our descent when we found ourselves staring down a herd of crazed water buffalo - not what you expect at these heights. We made a lot of noise. This made them angrier. We banged sticks. They got angrier and started pawing the ground. We gave up and scarpered. Luckily, water buffalo are stupid, and we gave them the slip by hiding behind a rock.
Then mist descended. This, I thought smugly, is why you take a guide and his entourage. Five minutes later my guide announced that he didn't know where he was either - though somehow it sounded so much more reassuring coming from him.
So we wandered around aimlessly in the high-altitude fog looking for something that looked familiar on a mountain where everything looked pretty similar even when it wasn't foggy.
After a couple of hours in the fog, we bumped into a goatherd who has lost his goats. We told him that we we'd lost our camp and that we had in fact seen some goats half an hour ago. He thanked us and, almost as an parting shot, added that he was pretty sure he'd seen some tents an hour ago, about three hills that way. Sure enough, 50 minutes later, we found our tents, with spiced chai waiting for us. I hope he found his goats.
The following day we hiked down, with my wife noting that, although she'd had fun and the views were splendid and the forests beautiful, "Trekking in the Himalayas for Pregnant Women" was unlikely to be a bestseller.
We grabbed a last trout curry at Johnson's and then drove to Shimla to stay at Chapslee Palace, a Raj summer house that hasn't changed (in any way whatsoever) since Edwardian times. Sitting by the cool, sunny lawn, eating cucumber sandwiches and drinking tea out of bone-china cups, the air perfumed by flowers rather than cannabis plants, we reflected that this was, perhaps, a more suitable place for a pregnant woman.
High in a Himalayan hippy haven
