Well, the most common route is flying to Delhi or Chandigarh and then taking the bus or taxi. But, we chose to fly to Kullu from Hyderabad via Delhi in outbound route and via Chandigarh in inbound. The itinerary we found at goibibo.com and we booked the flights from the same site. It’s a bit expensive affair but good for my back. Please note, as of this week 21/03/2018, there is a road expansion work going on at the route between Kullu and Manali which is causing the road very bumpy and dusty. Moreover, I have read in some reviews where people have suggested taking government bus instead of Volvo busses for security reason. I don’t know how much that supposed to be true but for us bus was not the option.

Kullu is at much lower range of the Himalayas and there are not too many tourist spots to visit. However, for trekking lovers it’s a good place as one can go to Kasol, Manikaran and especially, Khirganga to trek. There is 3 hours trek at the Khirganga which supposed to be very good, but we didn’t go there. We had only one extra day in Kullu, so we had a drive till Manikaran. The Parvathi River is very beautiful in Manikaran and the natural hot-spring is very famous, you can enjoy taking a deep there as well. There are some famous Temples and Dargah one can visit too. There are options for Paragliding and River Rafting in Kullu area, your hotel can help you on that if you are interested. You can also go to couple of other places from Kullu, namely the Great Himalayan National Park, Trinadha and Jalori. We got back from Kasol and Manikaran trip by afternoon and had Thukpa and Momo in lunch at a local joint as we love Tibetan delicacy. In evening, we decided to check out the locality, wanted to have a walk and find some more food joints for dinner. It was a lovely experience walking around the hilly town of Kullu, so different than the fast growing IT cities like Hyderabad. Indian hill stations are a bit crowded unlike Europe because they have very less population. Hill stations like Narni in Italy, Innsbruck in Austria and Annecy in France where we have been in our Europe trips hardly have people in those towns. Himalayan range has good population living in the mountain cities and villages, mostly living on tourism and farming.

On 15th March, we checked out from Hotel Shobla Royale and took a Taxi from Kullu to Manali. Its around one and a half hours journey and costs Rs. 1,300. Our Hotel Chandermukhi was also booked through goibibo and the property stands approximately 1.6 KM before Manali centre or Mall Road. The location of the hotel was good and bad both for us. It was good because we had an amazing view of the Hamta Pass Snow Mountain from the large window and River Beas flowing from few meters away from the hotel, right at the other side of the road. You see the river whole day and hear the water flowing sound very well for the whole night when the road gets less noisy. The bad part was that, we thought we could easily walk up to the city-centre (Mall Road) whenever we like to as the distance is only 1.6 km. But, unfortunately the road was under construction and very narrow at places, top on that, it rained and made the road watery, and, its quite an uphill. The only option we had was to take taxi or auto every time we wanted to go to the Mall Road. So, our suggestion will be: Try out more options near the Mall Road so you can walk up whenever you feel like but make sure the hotel is not at the mall road area, and then you won’t have a good view of snow-capped mountains, but the property better be near the mall road. Anyway, on our first day, we had a short walk in the Mall Road and had to run back to hotel because of heavy rain.