Traveblog#1 Manali

Manali, is a dream.
Atleast, it seems to me like that. I mean, it has clouds rolling down the mountains encasing pretty much everything. It has ridiculously good looking people, red-topped wooden cottages, cobbled streets, mist-covered pines....oh I could go on.
At a time where other places in India are roasting at a scorching 48 degs, Manali shivers at 2 degs.
And it's summer.
You come to know that it's summer in Manali when the locals roam around wearing flimsy shirts with no warm clothes on and you stand there in 7 layers of sweater, covered with a shawl and wearing two monkey-caps looking like a badly dressed terrorist. The people are polite and agree to everything you say (hanji hanji, okay hai ji, han han ho jayegaji), they even snigger very very politely when you drink large cups of tea in succession and shiver like a mobile set on vibration mode.
The scenery has thousands of roses, every color and shade imaginable, apple trees, snow-capped mountains, and a lot of hotels doing a passable imitation of Scottish Castles. The scenery is so colorful, so vibrant,  such mesmerizing mix of pine forests melting into mist, that it looks Photoshopped.
The streets are lined with thrift stores selling an ensemble of Himachali scarves and shawls, trinkets, colorful jwellery, usual hillstation stuff.
Driving here is a novice's worst nightmare. The roads, slippery with the rain are steep and have random blind turns. To add to that they are size zero and seem to mysteriously widen just enough to let a car and a bus simultaneously pass through. And if you don't find that challenging enough,  there are the occasional yaks (yes, yaks) standing right in the middle of a traffic snarl and not giving a single fuck.
You enjoy all that nonetheless, 'coz you are too busy pretending you're in a Yash Chopra dreamland. One can see a lot of couples on honeymoon,  and rightly so since Manali is something out of a 'once upon a time' fairytale awakening the romantic in you and giving rise to  a lot of passionate poets writing terrible poetry that later becomes a part of Google's sheron-shayari page results.
Seriously, it's an ideal place to come with your special someone and be a part of the quintessential DDLJ-ish Bollywood romance.
But what to do if you,  like me, are resolutely single and stuck in an dream-like, unimaginably romantic haven?
Sit down at the local dhaba, eat steaming hot butter-filled daal makhani with roti, and have a quarter of Old Monk warming you to your fingertips, sit back and just....enjoy.