Entries from September 2009 ↓

Our drive to Pangong lake had been a rushed one – partly due to the time constraints but largely because our driver was a impatient man in his early 30s who had been driving trucks in the region since he was 16 and wanted to be over and done with it as fast as the terrain would permit. As luck would have it, H. H. The Dalai Lama was due to deliver a sermon in Leh on the day of our journey. Our driver suddenly discovered that he had a spiritual side too, and decided to take a day off to nurture it there. We thus found ourselves being driven to Nubra Valley by a mild-mannered, amiable man in his late 40s.

Within 90 minutes of starting from Leh, we had left the Stok range far behind and were headed for Khardungla Top. As we moved higher, the roads that we had left behind began to look like they were mere lines carelessly traced by a child in sand. Looking at these photos three weeks later, even I find it hard to believe that these were huge mountains with roads built on them. Only the presence of the Stok range in the background manages to convey some sense of scale.

As you get closer to Khardungla you begin to see a few mountains with snow at their summit. And then, after turning behind a mountain, the pass itself makes itself visible. The scene at the pass is almost festive – with colorful player flags, a hubbub of tourists and the ritual photo-taking alongside the yellow board proclaiming Khardungla to be the world’s highest motor-able road.

The down-hill drive from here gets progressively easier and sceneic – with deep blue skies, the Karakoram range in front, an occasional patch of green and road signs that; given their picturesque settings, seem to convey succinct, Zen-like wisdom.

We were again staying at a camp-site and although the tents here were fancier, they were as unbearably warm during the day as the tents at Uley had been. Fortunately, the place was a veritable Eden (with apricots filling in for apples).

In the evening, we went for a short drive to Panamik to see the hot-water springs. Given the landscape so far, my imagination had run wild and I had a picture of grand endless planes sourrounded by mountains with pools of hot, bubbling springs spewing steam and jets of hot water. The reality is often much duller and Panamik was no exception. An odd geyser or two inside a concrete enclosure is hardly what I had in mind.

We were at our camp just before sunset – things had cooled down fast and the very tent that was an inferno in the afternoon was now a snug inviting thing. The sort of setting where sleep comes effortlessly.

We started for Pangong Lake at the crack of dawn and for a good reason. There is a stream just before Pangong that you must cross early, or risk being stranded on its banks. During the summers, a distant glacier is known to melt and turn this stream into an uncrossable torrent. The unpredictable nature of the stream has earned it a sobriquet of ‘Pagal Nala’; roughly translated, ‘Mad Brook’.

We began to see Pangong Lake much before we saw this notorious stream – a sliver of surreal copper-sulphate-blue peeking from behind the mountains. And when we finally crossed the stream by driving through the river bed of big, rounded pebbles and saw the lake for the first time, it all felt very dream-like.

The moment we got out, ice-cold winds howled in our ears and lashed at our faces. You barely notice it though, because you’ve been numbed by the beauty of the landscape. The lake has many hues – a sea-green that turns to turquoise which finally takes an azure tint.

Somewhere in the distance, a bunch of colorful player flags that had been tied to a wooden pole embedded into a pile of stones fluttered hysterically.

This is a salt-water lake that freezes during the winter. Our driver claimed to have driven over it! While at a distance it might seem like an opaque blue mass, the water is actually quite clear.

We had not had breakfast, so a bowl of hot Maggi and a cup of tea in a small tent-restaurant near the lake was like manna from heaven.

We said good-bye to the lake with a twinge of sorrow – we would have to leave before noon because the stream, once it is flooded, is equally uncrossable from either side.

We had seen little by way of Himalayan wildlife till now -an Ibex crossing a road on our first day out and then nothing else. On our way back, things improved a little on that front. We were still swooning over a pair of black-necked cranes when a Himalayan Marmot came close to me, stood up on its rear legs – very Meerkat-like – and enjoyed being petted on its head.

This one day is the ‘keyframe’ by which the memory of our entire Ladakh trip is filed in our minds.

The drive from Uley to the monastery at Alchi was a short one. The monastery was manned by a lone, old monk. In addition to handling his daily chores, he was also handing out the Rs. 20 ticket that would allow us an entry into the small temples inside the monastery. The temples had tall statues of Buddha and his desciples and walls covered in beautiful paintings – some dating back to 11th or 12th century. Photography inside is prohibited – mostly because the camera’s flash would wreck havoc with the colors of these barely-preserved paintings.

We came across this prayer wheel, a closer inspection of whose photo reveals that its lower spindle is supported inside a can whose contents were once “Tuna In Oil”. If Buddha is the man we know through his teachings, he might not have approved (though I am told that Buddhism need not necessarily imply vegetarianism).

The street leading back from the monastery was lined with souvenir sellers. It is here that I first noticed (and was quite besotted with) lapis lazuli – used in all sorts of trinkets and jewelry. The wife informed that I wasn’t the first person to be so charmed with the stone. Having read the poem, I must say that Yeats meant the poem to be about everything except the stone.

I was again impressed by the very existence of such well tended roads under such difficult conditions. Strangely, they don’t look out of place. The mountains seem to tolerate their presence. The less poetic of us will maintain that it is a truce that the Indian Army has forced the two to sign.

On returning to Leh, we got dropped all the way to the Leh Palace. Summers mean restoration work and large parts of the palace were under repair. The wooden sticks and the drying mud-bricks at the Palace’s terrace looked like they had been spewed out by the various openings in the palace’s walls.

The balconies of the palace offer a wonderful view of the town below.

We walked back to our guest house and spent the rest of the day lazing around. We’d need all the rest before the long, early-morning drive to Pangong lake the next day.

On the third day of our visit, we drove along the Indus river – a river we had only vague memories of having read about in our history and geography books in school. Occasionally, the river would vanish behind a hill or a mountain but it was never quite out of reach.

Our first stop was the Maitreya Temple of Basgo. Repair/construction/renovation work was on at this site and except for a few walls and rudimentary structures, it is is hard to tell the old from the reconstituted.

We then drove towards the Lamayaru monastery. The terrain got considerably difficult; the roads unpaved and narrower. We kept encountering heavy machinery – excavators, ground movers and such – toiling on patches of broken road in perhaps the world’s harshest terrain. Often we’d encounter heaps of boulders strewn about a narrow road and an excavator working on them. All you can do then is wait patiently for the excavator operator to execute some tricky maneuver from his playbook that would allow you to pass.

On our return from the monastery, we stopped at a small shack for lunch, which was a packet of Maggi cooked with chopped vegetables and served in a soup-like consistency. A stream – probably a tributary of Indus – roared past us.

Our stop for the night was at a place called Uley. The accommodation consisted of semi-permanent tents in a valley surrounded by mountains. The Indus gushed a few meters below. There were a few houses nearby, but hardly a human soul in sight. The barren mountains, a few scattered trees enjoying their brief summer and the river below reminded me a lot of the place where the protagonists of the movie The Planet of Apes found themselves when they landed on a desolate planet after hundreds of years in space.

Except that we found quite a few trees that had apples growing – we were told later not for commercial purposes – and hence free of pesticides and fertilizers. They weren’t the sweetest apples I’ve had, but they had the most apple-y aroma I’ve ever experienced.

The camps are designed in a way that they collect all the warmth they can during the day and gradually let go of it during the nights. Which means that they are unbearably warm till the sun has well and truly set. A siesta was thus completely ruled out. We sat in the gazebo that the owners of the camp had so thoughtfully built. I was fascinated by its roof, made of layers of wooden bars.

It was a clear night and the moon was in one of those distant phases from full where it doesn’t meddle with your pupils’ dilation. What looked like a passing cloud turned out to be the Backbone Of The Night – The Milky Way. It’s the sort of view that makes you feel inconsequential. It is hard not to feel light because a realization quickly sinks in – no matter how big your problems, they don’t matter in the grand scheme of things – and the overall of scheme of things is very grand indeed!

We found it hard to sleep on our first night in Leh. We woke up at least twice and both the times our breathing was heavy like Darth Vader’s. When we finally woke up, it was bright outside and we were feeling remarkably fresh for the amount of sleep we had had. The first thing I did; even before we had breakfast, was to go to our guest house’s terrace and take in the view of the Stok range again. It feels wierd to state this, but so overwhelmed was I with emotions at seeing the mountains, that it felt like I was being reunited with a close friend that I hadn’t seen in years.

We spent most of our second day lazing around in Leh or rather we were taking it easy because our guide never failed to remind us of perils of altitude sickness – though he said we were free to roam about in the market a little. We left around 10:30 in the morning and walked up the Fort Road towards the Leh Palace. As soon as we reached an important junction we saw a restive crowd standing in a neat file on either side of a road – as if awaiting the arrival of someone important. And someone important it was – H. H. the Dalai Lama’s visit to Ladakh was coinciding with ours (though I am sure it was the other way round) and a lot of people had devoutly lined up to watch his cavalcade pass by. We too stood there surprised at the timing of our visit to Ladakh and the market this morning, and within seconds the Dalai Lama’s jeep sped past us.

It took us almost 45 minutes to reach a densely populated (by Ladakh standards) settlement of mud-brick and concerete houses at the base of the Leh Palace. It wasn’t noon yet but the sun was already admonishing us for being over-dressed. The adage about it being possible to get frostbitten and sunburnt at the same time was holding true; only that it inclined heavily towards the sunburnt part. Mutts sat half-asleep and camouflaged in the shade. We took a few pictures of the palace but bookmarked the long, up-hill walk to the palace for another day. We wanted to stay on friendly terms with our lungs.

We traced our steps back to the main market and saw a shop selling a collection of intricately embroidered Tintin t-shirts. A lot of shops in Leh sell embroidered t-shirts – a few throw in an occasional Tintin t-shirt – but this place had the most elaborate collection of detailed Tintin designs.

By this time our grumbling tummies had joined the chorus of complaining body parts (led by the lungs of course). We finally settled at the World Garden Café just opposite the Leh Police Station. The place serves fresh, charcoal-oven-baked pizzas, home-made pasta and hummus-falafel-pita bread among other assortment of dishes from all over the world. A visit is highly recommended.

We went back to our guesthouse for a short siesta and this time I noticed a neat cabbage-patch in the midst of all those flower-beds. The garden at the guest house would continue to fascinate me right till the last day of our trip.

The sun had lost its bite when we left in the evening. The lane that led us from the guesthouse to the main road was lined with trees on one side. The sun was now behind them and their shadows cloned their world in silhouettes on the wall opposite.

The palace and a monastery near it were illuminated by the orange light of the setting sun. It all looked very surreal – electricity polls and wires criss-crossing across the street in front and the palace and the hills behind.

On our way back to the guesthouse we saw a bizarre sign at a telephone booth. The door was open inwards making the sign difficult to click. The shopkeeper saw my predicament, went inside and held the door for me to photograph! One hears about how the various cities are becoming photographer unfriendly – no sign of that here!

We were leaving everything behind – well for 9 days anyway – our work, the media, the Internet, the swine flu and the mosquitoes in the Kingfisher Red bus who were hell-bent on kissing us good-bye.

On the Delhi-Leh flight, the landscape below changes before the cabin crew drags the food trolly to your seat. In the beginning, we saw mountains that lacked my notions of Himalayan grandeur – inferior specimens disowned and banished by the Himalayas. But once you cross Shimla, you start to see what you’d probably consider no-so-distant cousins to Mt. Everest. Most mountains were covered in snow. Wisps of clouds cast sharp shadows on them.

As we got ready for descent, snow-capped peaks went into the background and their place was taken by mountains of varied colors and textures – barren but strikingly beautiful.

The luxury of being able to go from Delhi (239 m / 784 ft. above mean sea level) to Leh (3,500 m / 11, 483 ft. above mean sea level) within 90 minutes, comes at the risk of altitude sickness. You won’t feel a thing immediately – in fact you’ll welcome the crisp mountain air after having inhaled the re-re-circulated airplane air for over 90 minutes. But a few minutes there and you’ll realize that your breathing is suddenly not a sub-concious activity you perform in the background.

Our guest house was a mere 10 minutes drive from the airport and despite being in the main area of the town, was nicely secluded from the hubbub of tourists and traffic. We had our breakfast at the guest house’s roof-top café in stunned silence – it is hard to talk with a view like this:

The guest house also had a well-tended garden. Most plants have a 3-4 month window of survival and the flowers and plants here were determined to make the most of it; even more than I was determined to make the most of our first day indoors: