Ladakh, part two

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At 8am on the 30th October, on my fifth day in Ladakh, I was finally on my way to the Rumbak Valley look for snow leopards.

I took a taxi for an hour out of Leh, along a road sliced from the sheer sides of river valleys, past the four or five buildings which make up Zingchan (the end of the road until one or two years ago) and came to a halt at "the first campsite" in Rumbak Valley, where the snow leopard tours generally base themselves. Directly to the left is the mouth of the Husing Valley and about ten minutes walk back down the road is the mouth of the Tarbung Valley - the two primary sites for looking for snow leopards. My base was an hour's walk further up the Rumbak Valley, the village of Rumbak itself. I had availed myself of a guide for the day, just in case the trail was difficult to follow, but in fact it is simplicity itself and my money was wasted - the valley is narrow, maybe twenty to thirty metres wide most of the time with a large stream/small river flowing down its length, and the trail just follows it to the top where the "second campsite" is. It takes about an hour to walk between the two campsites, and the trail isn't difficult at all. Rumbak is only about ten or fifteen minutes further on from the second campsite, heading left, although at the end of a day that short distance sometimes took twice as long; there's a fairly gentle incline just before the village, which at 4050 metres can feel like a 90% slope! Curiously both the walk down the valley and up the valley took much the same time.

Based on all the trip reports from mammalwatchers coming up here I had been expecting it to be frigidly-cold. So before setting out I had put on thermals and several layers of clothing. On the walk to the village I cursed the inability of Americans and Europeans to take temperatures of less than twenty degrees without whining. I managed to divest myself of some outer layers but the thermals had to stay on unless I wanted to completely disrobe to remove them. Suffice to say that by the time I arrived at the village I was well overheated, and for the rest of my trip the thermals remained unused. Most of the time I was only wearing a tshirt and hooded tracksuit top and was perfectly comfortable. The only time I put on my jacket was if it was windy (which was rarely) or when I was sitting in shadow. I'm not sure of actual temperatures but during the day it was probably five or ten degrees Celsius, and at night definitely below freezing. The smaller streams by the village were permanently frozen. It got colder over the two weeks - the small river up the valley was ice-free when I arrived but maybe 60% iced-up when I left - but I can't say it was uncomfortable for a New Zealander.

I saw my first mammals on the way up, just past the first bridge in a scree of large broken rocks, where there was a pair of large-eared pikas (or maybe Royle's pikas - both are apparently found here and they are difficult to tell apart, but large-eared seems to fit best so that's what I have them down as for now). Completely unexpectedly, pikas proved to almost completely absent during my time up here. I saw one or two pikas at this same spot every day I passed (probably the exact same two pikas), and just one other which I saw for two days running further up the valley which I think was a Nubra pika but both times it was so quick to bolt into its hole amongst the boulders that I never got a good enough look at it to be sure.

I saw few birds on the way up, only a white-winged redstart, a couple of white-browed tit-warblers, two golden eagles and a lammergeier - all birds I had seen on the eastern end of the Tibetan plateau in China. Rumbak village proved to be full of birds however, with the first seen being flocks of chukar in the small fields out front. I've only seen chukar in New Zealand, where they were introduced to the mountains for hunting, so it was great seeing genuine wild ones in the Himalayas. They are everywhere here - you literally couldn't look at a field by the village without seeing a dozen or so of them chucking about like chickens. In the early morning they would come walking between the buildings from their roosts on the hillside above. Possibly outnumbering the chukar were robin accentors - again, just everywhere in the village. There were also Eurasian magpies, small groups of hill pigeons (which basically look like feral pigeons except for the white tail), and a few common rosefinches. On the first day I saw a couple of house sparrows but not again after that.

Rumbak village has 137 inhabitants apparently, although there are only about fifteen buildings. Nine of those double as homestays. Later I realised that most of the younger members of the village work in Leh for the tourist season, and move back to the village over winter. The homestay I parked myself at was called Rabgaispa Homestay, owned by Dolma and her husband Lopzung, neither of whom spoke more than a few words of English. In fact English was remarkably absent in Rumbak. But I was only ever there at the start of the day for breakfast and the end of the day for dinner and sleeping, so there wasn't much communication going on anyway. There are only two dogs in the village, both of which were friendly and rarely seen, so my prior fears of being eaten quickly disappeared.

That first day, after settling in and having lunch, I went for a wander along the willow-lined frozen stream near the village. There wasn't a lot to see, but a common wren (winter wren to Americans) was new for the trip. As with some of the other common birds, the only time I've seen common wrens previously was in the mountains of China. On the way back, getting near dusk, I surprised a woolly hare in the fields. The best-looking hare I've ever seen! I don't know if its the thick fur or the colouration but it is a really striking animal. So I only saw two species of mammals today, but both of them were species I had never seen before.

The next morning was my first real day of snow leoparding. The sun doesn't come up until a bit after 6am, and there is no electricity (apart for a generator in the evening) so there's no point getting up earlier. Usually I would wake up and then just lie there for an hour or so before it was light enough to bother rising. Dolma would bring a thermos of tea to my room around 6.10, and then at 7am I would go down for breakfast which would be some form of fried dough and a fried omelette. I had little appetite for the first couple of days but soon got over that, and by the end of my stay there I was even starting to tolerate the Tibetan cuisine (it is based largely around dough made of wheat-flour and water, with additions of root vegetables and sometimes rice and dal). Breakfast would be as stated above; lunch would be much the same but also including a boiled egg and potato (I took lunch out with me every day); dinner would usually be some sort of stew of dough and vegetables. The trick was to eat a dough item at the same time as a vegetable item to enable you to actually get it down. If you tried just eating a dough item by itself it would end up being like trying to chew a wad of glue.

My basic plan was to walk each day down to the Husing and Tarbung Valleys and sit somewhere high and advantageous to scan the cliffs for signs of life. It takes so long to walk anywhere at this altitude that there seemed little point in trying to move around too much - planting myself in one likely spot for the day was probably the best strategy. The real problem (of course) is that snow leopards are incredibly shy and elusive, and also incredibly well camouflaged. There could be a dozen snow leopards within a hundred metres of you in this terrain and you'd never see them until they move. And from one position you can see maybe five to ten cliff-faces and mountain-sides, out of the hundreds or thousands that a snow leopard could currently be on.

The mountains here are actually amazingly varied. You've got domed sand-coloured ones, and then right behind those there would be deep purple ones, and then behind those there would be great jagged spires. It was like someone had been tasked with designing the Himalayas but had never seen mountain ranges before, so they just emptied out the whole box in one spot and said "that'll do". The rocks come in every colour imaginable, including bright green and red and white; some rocks are striped with bands of different colours. There are cliffs which look like they are covered in fuzzy green fur because they are entirely composed of shattering slate. Slopes may be jumbles of rocks, sheer slabs of granite, or screes of slate chips. Some areas look straight out of Barsoom. The terrain is really quite bewildering in its complexity. And it's completely silent apart for the calls of choughs now and then, or the occasional clatter of stones dislodged by bharal. Sometimes it felt like I was on the moon.

So this first morning, I walked past the groups of chukar and hill pigeons in the village, over the frozen stream, through the second campsite, and made my way back down the Rumbak Valley to the Husing Valley. It took a little longer than anticipated because I kept stopping along the way to scan the surrounding cliffs. Near the Husing Valley I came across a small group of bharal (blue sheep), which are the snow leopard's prey. As winter progresses the bharal move down the mountains away from the snow (so they can still feed), and the snow leopards follow them down. This group was small, only eight animals, mostly females and young. I saw the same group almost every day in the Husing Valley. There is no hunting here so all the animals are very casual around humans. They aren't tame but they aren't afraid either - I suppose you could say they are aloof. So long as you don't approach too closely (say, within fifty metres) they mostly ignore you.

Today was almost like a reconnaissance, to get the lay of the land as it were. I climbed (slowly, breathing hard) up the Husing Valley. After a good amount of climbing quite a way up I decided that tour groups wouldn't be taking old people up through such rugged terrain, so I headed downwards. As it turned out the scanning positions for the tour groups aren't very far up into the valley after all. The prime spot is still about twenty minutes in, but that is only because you have to keep stopping to breathe. Once I had found what seemed like the the best spot to sit and wait, I did just that. The only animals I saw were yellow-billed choughs. But it would have been silly to have expected to see a snow leopard on my first day - especially when doing it solo you should never expect to see a snow leopard, simply hope to see a snow leopard!

The main problem with staying in the village rather than at the first campsite is the one of travel times. You don't get down to the Husing Valley until about 9am and then in order to get back to the village before dark you have to leave the valley at about 3.30 or 4pm (giving yourself 20-30 minutes to get down from the Husing, an hour up the Rumbak, and then 20-30 minutes to the village itself). So the days are much shorter than they would be otherwise. Heading back to the village on this first day I saw the bharal herd again, the same large-eared pikas as before, and two new birds for the trip, brown dipper and brown accentor (the latter being a lifer for me). Back at the village I saw another woolly hare.

The next two days were repeats of the first - down to the Husing, sit and watch. The same herd of eight bharal, the same flock of yellow-billed choughs. No snow leopard. Still, I wasn't too worried. Three days out of my allotted eleven was fine, and I wasn't really expecting to see one so soon anyway. I was, however, becoming a little concerned that the only bharal I was seeing down there were the same eight every day. The weather did seem warmer than I had been expecting, and if there are no bharal moving down then there won't be any snow leopards! I decided that for the fourth day I would visit the Tarbung Valley and see what, if anything, was happening there. When I got back to the village (on the third day) there was a flock of twenty bharal on the nearby slopes, which the next morning had become forty. Hopefully that was a good sign.

The following morning, as I was heading out of the village to the Tarbung Valley, a man with some better English than most asked where I was going. I said to the Tarbung and he scoffed and said (as far as I could tell) that there were no snow leopards down there yet - I needed to go upwards towards Yurutse, not downwards. I decided to stick with the Tarbung for now (I had already told the people at my homestay where I was going, as I did every morning in case I hadn't returned in the evening) and then would try going upwards tomorrow. Further down the valley I passed the donkey man who I had seen in the Husing for the last two days (his donkeys are sent up there to graze). I said I was going to the Tarbung and he replied "snow leopard, no". I couldn't tell if he was asking if I had seen any yet, or telling me there were none down there yet. But it was starting to tie in with me not seeing many bharal and my worry that it was just too early for the cats to be moving downwards. On the other hand, I knew the tour groups start coming up in September or October, and why would they do that if that was too early for any success?

The Tarbung Valley mouth is about ten or fifteen minutes walk further back down the road from the mouth of the Husing Valley. It is on the opposite side, and you need to cross the little river to get to it. The access isn't as easy as the Husing - I mean, it isn't difficult, it is just the initial part is forcing through some scrubby juniper and then there are a couple of precipitous donkey-tracks across the sides of steep hillsides, sometimes no wider than one of my boots, the first one winding across a slope of gravelly sand and the second across a nerve-wracking scree of slate shards. Once past these (and the return seemed even more treacherous!) the valley is really nice with good vantage spots. I saw a small group of bharal, perhaps even the same goup from the Husing, a golden eagle, and a big flock of rock doves. I was seeing pairs or singles of golden eagles and lammergeiers quite often, but always soaring, never close up. The doves were my first truly wild rock doves. This species is the original of the domestic pigeon, the feral form being what you see in cities all over the world. There were a few around Rumbak but I wasn't sure if they were actual wild birds (as the hill pigeons were) or domestics. These ones in the Tarbung were the genuine article though, so I was quite pleased to see them.

There were, however, no snow leopards.

Tomorrow I would try looking higher up the mountains, further up than Rumbak.

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Photos

wild sheep skulls
the one in the middle is a Tibetan argali, the two either side are bharal (blue sheep)

Hill pigeon (Columba rupestris)
the white tail is how you tell them apart from feral pigeons...