Tag: Manali-Rohtang

It’s unbelievable even to think that the 52 km mountainous journey to Rohtang pass is consuming eight to ten precious hours of tourists due to the frequent traffic jams. Around 4,000 heavy, medium and small vehicles are reaching Rohtang every day. Unavailability of parking space, haste to reach the mountain top first and inexperienced driving are causing hours long traffic jam on the poor Manali-Rohtang highway. Tourists, locals, military and needy, everyone was becoming victim to it. Now the jams are shading its negative impacts on the tourism. Most of the exhausted tourists are returning back from midway without reaching Rohtang. “Usually the uphill journey to Rohtang pass takes 2 hours and downhill journey takes 1.5 hours but sometime it is taking more than 10 hours these days,” said a taxi driver Yuvraj Bisht, adding that there are many reasons ignoring which were causing unbelievable jams. “Inadequate parking space is the main problem here. Everybody is forced to park his car on the highway. Tourists often stop at many places for photography or other reasons and park their vehicles on the highway which triggers kilometres long jam within few minutes” he said. Annoyed by jams and returning back to Manali from midway, Sukhvinder Singh and Mamta Sidhu, tourists from Ludhiana told Discover Kullu Manali they had started at 5 am from Manali and they could cover only 33 km (Marhi) in 6 hours. “Driving on congested road to Rohtang is really terrible experience. My wife told me that we can get trapped in jams till late night at Rohtang pass, so we should return back to the town,” he adds. Singh said he had last visited Rohtang in 2001 when driving on the road was such a pleasant experience but now it has turned out to be a nightmare. While