From Manali, it is an hour’s drive to the Kullu Valley airport, which has daily flights to Delhi as long as monsoon rains didn’t cause a cancellation. Our onward flight to San Francisco left just after midnight, so we had to get out that day. So we had bought both an airplane ticket and a backup ticket on the evening train from close to Chandigarh ten hours away. So if our flight got cancelled, we would have just enough time to drive down and take the train and rush back to the Delhi airport.

Fortunately, the weather was okay and Indian Airlines was flying with only an hour’s delay. We bid farewell to our guide and before we knew it we were back in the heat and noise of Delhi.

Not wanting to be outside in the hot afternoon, we decided to spend a few hours in India’s National Museum, which has a rightly famous collection of artifacts from the nation’s rich history. Unfortunately, the museum’s building is almost as ancient as its collection, and a few fans were the only attempt at cooling. As a result, we could only enjoy a few highlights before returning to our hotel.

On the way back, I stopped in on another of Jai Singh II’s eighteenth-century observatories. Similar to but smaller than the one we had seen in Jaipur, the Delhi observatory consisted of several large sundails and other instruments that allowed calculation of the Sun’s and stars’ positions in various spots on the globe. It was a fitting end to a very long trip.

————– end of detailed Ladakh trek entries ————–