Headaches.....Hypothermia and Happiness!

Arrived in Pang.  Basically a tent city where people come down from Leh when the snow melts to set up tents for travelers to say on their transit between Leh and Manali, a 475KM stretch of not much.  We chose Pang over Sarchu because there is a Army base at Pang should AMS set in and put us in the hurt locker.  I brought a bunch of kids books with me and have been giving them out along the way to little ones, this will be the most memorable!

Won't find this joint on KAYAK or HOTELS.COM!

Downtown Pang looking down from the front gate of the Army base that is there.  Traffic was horrendous!

My rack for the night.  Four bucks and actually the most comfortable bed I have slept on since arriving in this country.  No joke, 4 bucks!

Time for Rack Ops!  Yep that's a blanket below me, my sleeping bag, I had long johns on, a jacket with another blanket over  me.  Those blankets they gave us weighed in at 20 pounds a piece.....no lie.  I woke at 1am with the worst headache I have ever had in my life.........like someone was taking ice picks and ramming them into my temple.  I touched the side of my head and my temples were pulsating like a freaking paint shaker at Home Depot.  I grabbed some Diamox and popped one.........all better in about 15 minutes.  Then I had to get up and go Pee.........it was Arctic Ocean  cold......We are at over 15K and the freaking wind was howling!.......  I know cuz I have been there by the way, and I was practically frozen by the time I climbed back into my Tonn Tonn!  Mild AMS can kiss my ass........that hurt!

"Yo white dude with the sunglasses on, is that a book in your Monkey Phalanges?"

"Hey SchlepRock, I'm totally digging this book about Zebras, but do you have something a little more in my wheelhouse, say.......about trucks or race cars bro?"

So I went to the well one more time and ponied up.  There were several kids in Pang and I handed out books to dudes, little girls and one lucky girl scored the coloring book, all the way from the dollar store way back in the hood.  Her and the fam went ape nutz!  Everyone was pretty happy and  we could see the kids playing with the books until it was dark.  When I gave homeboy above the two books in the bonus round, he started dancing in circles and spinning around with them above his head...........then he did like this dance like the "Icky Shuffle".......remember that from the day?  If you don't know Icky Woods.......you don't know know the NFL..........and you don't know SH&%!

Meet Saved......pronounced (Saw-veed).  What a story.  We pull up, trying to talk to some locals with no luck and up walks Saved.  Perfect English and a big ass smile on his face.  He is a school teacher from Dehli who teaches English to 6-8th graders at a private school in Dehli.  26 years old and his family are all educators.  His brother is also a teacher (heard that story before Steve) and his dad was (is) a Principal.  For the hell of it, he has two months off and decided to ride his mountain bike from Leh to Dehli, opposite direction as us.  He told us the tent was clean and the people were good, so we moneyed  up.  We talked about everything from India's school system, politics, the way females are treated in India.....the entire gambit.  He had great info on the roads up north and the works for our ongoing journey, and it helped he spoke the local language so he could hook us up, including buying Petrol from our host in Aqufina bottles.  He was a really smart young man with a hilarious sense of humor, even dropped an occasional F-bomb when talking about terrorists, getting married, and Dehli traffic.  In the morning we all hugged it out........ I got his contact info and when he bikes across "Murrrrica in a couple of years, I told him I had plenty of hookups back in the hood to stay at. 

Pang was really good to us.  The people are incredibly kind and.........as you can see, have that Tibetan look as their skin tone and eyes are changing as we move north.  Leh or bust for us next!