Ladakh

---

Ladakh has, without a doubt, been the best part of my trip. That said, it got off to a slow start. While waiting outside the Delhi airport (they wouldn’t let us in until after 4:00) in the wee hours of the morning for my 5:45AM flight, I could feel a scratch in my throat, and by the end of the day I had a cold. Fortunately my guesthouse in Leh is spectacular, so I spent my first four days just hanging out, recovering from the cold and adjusting to the change from more or less sea level to 11,500 ft, the altitude of Leh. My room is about 14x17 ft and sits on the corner of the house, so two walls are solid windows looking out over Leh, the Indus valley, and the Stok massif to the south, which I hope to climb before I leave. The food is excellent and there are hot showers (the water is solar heated), which is a nice change from the normal bucket hot water. The room and food add up to $8 a day.

There is a large Tibetan community in Leh, and the day that I arrived, May 23rd, is apparently the anniversary of Tibet becoming part of China. There was a large protest/gathering downtown, with banners and signs and people speaking through sound systems urging anyone who could hear to somehow not support the 2008 Olympics because of China’s treatment of Tibet. The second-most important figure in Tibetan Buddhism after the Dalai Lama, the Panchen Lama, apparently disappeared in Tibet 10 years ago when he was 6 years old, and hasn’t been seen or heard from since. “Free Tibet” is everywhere, from restaurants and shops to t-shirts the dashboards of the military trucks that make up a large portion of the traffic outside of Leh.

Since the buses here have very erratic schedules and simply don’t run to some areas, many people rely on taxis (the majority of which are SUVs) to visit sites outside of Leh. I found three other people from my guesthouse to share a taxi with me to Pangong Lake, about 100 miles southeast of Leh. We made the roundtrip in one day, but it was a very long day. We left at 6:00AM and didn’t get back until 8:15PM, and only about an hour of that was actually spent at the lake. The road to Pangong goes over a pass that’s around 17,500 ft, and it snowed the night before our trip. At somewhere around 14,500 ft, many of the vehicles began to have problems with the snowy road, and traffic began to back up. Our taxi driver was one of the worst offenders - his back tires were nearly bald (the SUV was rear-wheel drive) and he didn’t have chains. It took us three hours to go perhaps 5-10 miles. This snail’s pace was only possible because dozens of people, from robed Buddhist monks to Western tourists to taxi and truck drivers, were using rocks and their bare hands to dig up dirt and rocks from the side of the road to spread over the ice, allowing the vehicles to gain some traction. When we finally reached the top of the pass, my hands were filthy and numb, and my frontside was covered in muddy slush thrown by spinning tires as we tried to push the vehicles up to the pass one by one.

Only a small portion of Pangong Lake is actually in India - most of it lies in Tibet. It’s surrounded by mountains and the water is extremely clear, since nothing grows in the brackish water. I walked along the shore for about half an hour, but there wasn’t really much else to do. I don’t believe there are any trails, and in any case we had very little time since we had to start back for Leh to get over the pass before dark. Tourists are required to stay in a relatively small area around the lake. We had to get passes from the government in Leh to be able to visit the area, and they were checked three different times en route. After inhaling some chow mein from a shack near the lake’s edge, we made the trip back to Leh in comparatively very short time, as the road had been cleared since our morning struggles. Unfortunately I suffered a severe tragedy on the way back when my iPod called it quits after nearly four years of faithful service. When I turn it on, it shows me a frowning iPod and directs me to Apple’s support website.

The next morning I took a bus about 80 miles west to Lamayuru, a small town that’s home to one of Ladakh’s most famous monasteries. It was founded in the 11th Century, but looks like it might not last too much longer. It sits on a cliff above town, and there are deep clefts reaching under the monastery where the cliff has eroded. Logs have been rather haphazardly jammed in some of the spaces to provide support, but they don’t look like they’re doing much good. The bus ride back to Leh was remarkable in that I had, by far, the most aggressive and seemingly out-of-control driver I’ve had thus far on my trip. Most of you have probably heard stories of how chaotic Indian roads can be, and it is true that, in my experience, drivers in all parts of the country have no concept of lanes and will overtake on corners or near the tops of hills, or even when oncoming traffic is plainly too near for safety. The Indian solution to this is that you constantly lean on the horn to warn oncoming traffic of your idiocy.

If mountain roads in the US have ever made you uneasy, mountain roads in India would probably make you shriek in terror. They are, without exception, one lane wide, and the majority of the traffic is buses, large goods-hauling trucks, and massive military trucks. When two vehicles meet and manage come to a stop before colliding, the drivers must decide who will back up to a suitably wide area so the other guy can sneak past him. The driver on the way back to Leh from Lamayuru drove considerably faster than any other bus driver I’ve had. He so liberally sounded the horn on corners that I don’t think he could possibly have heard the horn of any oncoming vehicles. If his incessant honking wasn’t enough to drown out other honking, the ear-splitting “music” (women screeching) that blasted from the awful quality speakers made sure of it. On the six hour drive to Leh, he only backed up once to make way for oncoming trucks, and that was probably because it was a military convoy. He once got out of the bus to shout and shake his fist at another driver when he didn’t immediately back up to make way for us. We did, however, make it safely back to Leh, and in much better time than the ride to Lamayuru.

Once back in Leh, I had to obtain another permit to visit a restricted area. I was taking another bus to the Nubra Valley, the northernmost part of India accessible to tourists. Further north is the Siachen Glacier, where the Indian and Pakistani armies are in a staring match at 22,000 ft, each preventing the other from claiming any additional rock and ice. The road to Nubra and Siachen is the highest in the world, topping out at 18,300 ft, and the army keeps it open more or less year around so they can move materials and people to the front. Our bus left at 6:00AM, and at about 7:30AM and 17,000 ft, it broke down. Somehow the driver repaired it after an hour, though it was quite a cold wait while he did so. It was overcast, windy, and snowing. We stopped for a few minutes at the top of the pass so people could take pictures, then plunged down 8,000 ft to the valley below.

The Nubra Valley is actually about 1,300 ft lower than Leh, and days were quite warm as long as the sun was shining. All of the other Westerners on the bus got off in the same town, and after brief introductions we set out to find a guesthouse. There were three Germans, two Dutchmen, a Russian and myself, all of us in our mid to late 20s. Two of the Germans, Alex and Esther, were a couple, and the Dutch also shared a room. The remaining German and Russian, who had been traveling together for a few weeks, asked if I wanted to share a room with them, which I agreed to do. I have been traveling on a budget of $20-$30 a day, which is very comfortable but does force frugality at times. Markus (the German) and Dennis (the Russian, whose name isn’t Dennis but sounded similar to it so that’s what it is to me) were traveling on a budget of no more than $6 or $7 a day, so they haggled the guesthouse down on both the room and the food (I thought both were reasonably priced and would have paid what they asked). Our room was $1.25 per person per night.

Unfortunately the two Dutch guys left early the next morning to return to Leh - they only wanted to be able to say that they'd been over Khardung La, the highest road in the world, and they were on a very tight schedule. The rest of us decided to walk to the nearest town, which was only four or five miles over the valley floor, so we figured it would be a breeze. It turned out to involve three stream crossings, dense thickets of thorny hedges, and rolling sand dunes that were even more tiring to climb than loose snow. Once we made it, the only thing we could find for lunch (it was actually about 3PM by this point) was days-old baked goods. We didn't want to stay in the new town, so we settled down by the road to wait for a ride. None of the infrequent buses came by, so we started to hitch in whatever numbers could be accomodated. Markus and Dennis got a ride fairly quickly, but Alex, Esther and I waited for quite a while before a passing rock-hauling truck stopped for us. Esther squeezed in to the cab, but Alex and I climbed into the back for possibly the bumpiest ride of our lives.

Over the next three days, I only once managed to flag down one of the overloaded buses that ply the two roads in the valley. It was so packed with schoolchildren that I rode on top with the extra fuel containers. I also got rides from an SUV taxi and twice from military trucks, once in the cab (with a very friendly and talkative officer) and once in the bed (with a bunch of grunts). After some confusion about which town we were meeting in, the five of us met up again to play cards, visit a hot springs, and generally do not too much. We did come across a herd of double-humped Bactrian camels, which apparently are a relic of the fact that the Silk Road passed through the valley before crossing the Karakorum to the North and continuing to China and Central Asia. We also found some rather unimpressive hot springs, around which a squat, ugly concrete shack had been built. Yesterday we came back by bus to Leh and had a farewell dinner for Markus and Dennis (they left this morning for Manali, a two day bus ride to the south).

I plan to stay in Ladakh for another two weeks or so, during which time I hope to go on a trek and/or climb Stok Kangri, a relatively easy peak near town that's a little over 20,000 ft. It's very easy, however, to simply hang out in Leh, reading and playing cards or ping pong with other travelers. I may go back to Delhi a little earlier than planned so I have time to visit Agra, home of the Taj Mahal. Memories of the heat, however, make me inclined to stay in Leh for as long as possible.

---

Photos

Leh
Looking South over Leh from the dilapidated fort.

En route to Pangong Tso
The problems begin.

Pangong Tso
Pangong Tso (lake), Tibet in the background (or maybe out of picture to the right, I dunno).

Markus and Alex
Markus (l) and Alex (r) near the Shyok River in the Nubra Valley. Esther gets a head start.