Snow Leopards, round two

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My final day at Banikhet in the Dalhousie area was wasted because I got sick during the night, I think probably food poisoning. It was the only meal I ate from the hotel's own kitchen (with room service because they didn't have a restaurant) and, funnily enough, while I was eating it I was thinking "I bet I'm going to get sick from this". And I did. I had one Norflox tablet left over from Ladakh in November so I took that for my stomach, and an Ibuprofen (also from Ladakh) for the headache, and then stayed in the hotel room all day. The next morning I felt okay which was good because I was needing to be spending all that day on buses!

It was three hours to Pathankot, descending on an endessly winding road trying not to think about throwing up, and then another three hours on a bus to the city of Jammu in the neighbouring state of Jammu And Kashmir. That second bus was so full I spent most of the trip standing.

I had never had any prior intention of going to Jammu but that is from where I had found a cheap flight to Leh. From the bus stop I walked round numerous hotels, all with the immediate response of "no rooms" or "all full". Several times the reception guys would immediately start shaking their heads as soon as I appeared in the doorway. This was a little suspicious because I've never come across so many "full" hotels before, especially when they clearly have empty rooms visible. At one point when I stopped at a tuktuk stand to ask if they knew any hotels, there was a conversation amongst the men in which I heard "Green View Hotel" and "foreigner" which I thought confirmed my suspicion that most of the hotels simply weren't allowed or didn't want a foreigner staying there. Sure enough, after asking at several hotels en route to the Green View, all of them "full", the Green View had a room for 600 rupees.

I'm not sure how many foreigners even come here. At the restaurant at which I got dinner that night, every single person in there was staring at me like I was an alien. Possibly of note, if you check your government website's travel advisory, Jammu will probably be on there. I just checked the New Zealand page and it says "There is extreme risk to your security in Jammu and Kashmir due to the threat of terrorist activity and ongoing political violence." I think most countries are listing the state as a high or extreme risk, and while the city of Jammu is not considered as life-threatening it will still say something like "reconsider your need to travel there." On the other hand it will probably say something about the whole of India being unsafe to some degree and not to go there.

There was a tv in my room, and when I turned it on there was an Indian music video playing. Back in my home-town of Christchurch in New Zealand, there is a kids' paddling pool next to the beach at New Brighton, and in the pool is a concrete whale. On this video there was a girl in a paddling pool next to a concrete whale while the guy sung to her from the side. "Huh, funny, there's one of those in India too," I thought. Next scene, I thought "wait, that's the outside of the New Brighton library!". The whole music video had been filmed in New Zealand - at one point they were in front of the Timaru Motors sign. I knew Bollywood movies filmed in New Zealand quite often but I had no idea they came all the way over there to film music videos. That doesn't seem to make any sort of sense financially, especially when they are just filming scenes in towns and cities.

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Back in October/November I spent some time in Ladakh looking for snow leopards. I did not see any snow leopards then but I was told that January to March is the very best time to look for them, despite it being the dead of winter, because that is when they are breeding and lose all their shyness, as well as when they are at their lowest altitudes. In brief terms, during winter the bharal move downwards because their grazing gets covered in snow, and the snow leopards follow them down. At other times of the year they are much higher up and much less accessible for people to find.

I decided to return to Ladakh to try my luck again. My Indian visa would run out in early February, which meant mid- to late-January was my time-frame. For the last couple of months I had been carrying around my cold-weather clothes for this purpose and I was hopeful they would actually get some use this time. It was quite cold in Himachal Pradesh where I had just come from (to see the Chamba sacred langurs - see the last main blog post) and in Ladakh I would be much higher. My fingers were crossed for freezing temperatures. I have some sort of unnatural resistance to cold. It's like an X-Men-style mutation, where my superpower is being able to go birding when it's cold outside. I was hoping to find a level of coldness to challenge me when I got up to Ladakh but no. It was extremely cold up there (at least minus twenty Celsius at night) but I rarely felt inconvenienced by it. I shake my fist in defiance at the god of winter.

I was told to be at the Jammu airport two hours before the flight. In Jammu and Kashmir and in Ladakh there is supposedly heightened security measures at the airports which holds things up. I say "supposedly" because I didn't actually see any signs of this either in October/November or now in January. But my flight was at 9.30am so I got there at 7.30am. The airport wasn't open yet. Anybody dumb enough to have actually turned up early stood outside the gates in an orderly queue until the guards started letting people in at 7.45. But that was only to get through to the waiting room, and it wasn't until 8am that everybody continued on to the terminal. The power kept going in and out which held things up quite a bit - the x-ray machines would take a little bit to restart after each power outage, a few people would get their bags through, and then the power would cut out again. Despite all the hold-ups I was at the check-in desk by 8.30am, an hour before the flight which is (of course) plenty of time for domestic. In any case it turned out that the flight was delayed by about an hour.

It's only about forty minutes to fly between Jammu and Leh. There were a surprisingly large number of passengers - the plane was basically full. I had been under the impression that there were virtually no tourists to Ladakh in winter, which is why half of Leh shuts down until spring, but I discovered that for just a few weeks in January there is an influx of a few hundred mainly-Indian tourists to do the Chardar Trek which is a multi-day hike along a frozen river through the mountains.

Last time I was in Leh everything was the green and yellow of autumn. Now all the leaves were gone and everything was brown. The entire town was the same shade of dusty brown, and only the surrounding mountains were white. That afternoon Leh also turned white, with the first snowfall they had received that winter. It used to be that Leh was under snow all winter every winter; now it rarely snows there due to changes in the global weather patterns.

Rather stupidly I hadn't booked anywhere to stay. I hadn't had any good internet access for ages which was the main reason, but also I hadn't expected there to be much in the way of competition for rooms in winter at those few hotels which remain open. Luckily there was no problem, and I got a room at the Cozy Corner Hotel where I had stayed last time. There had been a change of management in the last couple of months and the price had gone up a little but not by too much. The new manager said I could have a room without heating for 900 rupees or one with heating for 1200 rupees. Because I am a̶n̶ ̶i̶d̶i̶o̶t̶ clever I chose the unheated option. It was going to be even colder up at Rumbak so no point wasting money on heating down here.

The toilet in the bathroom was frozen solid (boiling water poured into the bowl solved that) and all the pipes were frozen so instead there was a big bucket of ice-cold water. Looked like no washing for the next ten days! That evening while I was eating dinner in my room I was literally watching the water in the glass on the table freeze inwards across the surface. And I do mean "literally" in the true sense of the word, not figuratively.

I rested up for the first day to get used to the altitude but really it didn't affect me too much. I'm not sure if that was because I had come from Himachal Pradesh rather than Delhi (i.e. I had been at an in-between altitude for a week or so) or if it was just random. The second day I walked round to the Wildlife Office, about forty minutes away, to see about the permits for the Hemis National Park. Last time I had done this through the Eco-Tourism place in town but there were some discrepancies in what I was being told about pricing so I thought I'd go to the actual office to be sure. This, in fact, did not work out in my favour. In October I had paid 3000 rupees for ten days; this time I paid well over twice that, at 7600 rupees for five days! (In both cases the number of days were estimates, so I really spent longer in the park on both occasions). The difference was due to the Snow Leopard Foundation fee, which is 1500 rupees per day and which had been somewhat side-lined last time. The actual park entry fee is just 20 rupees per day but that's only if you're trekking from one village or camp to the next - anybody staying in the area is considered to be snow leopard watching and has to pay the 1500 for each day they are there. At least it was still a lot cheaper than going on a tour.

There's a tourist office in town and I had been in there earlier. The guy in there had told me I should just go to the national park without a permit because there was nobody up there to check it anyway. This had been tempting in monetary terms but just totally against my ethics. Firstly, it's not in my nature to be dishonest; secondly, the fees are there (in theory - and I do think at Hemis in reality) to help preserve the park which is obviously important; and thirdly, I don't know how strict or casual the reaction would be to being caught without permits. I suspect in Ladakh there would be no problem if caught, and I doubt anybody would be checking anyway. The first time I was up there I barely saw anybody. This time I saw a few groups but nobody asked me for permits - on the other hand I guess all the guides already know who is supposed to be up there so would have known I already had the permits.

Anyway, the permits were sorted and everything was good. I could have gone up to Rumbak on the third day but I had pencilled that in for birding at Thiksey where people go to see ibisbill on the Indus River. It's easy to get to by shared taxi. From the Main Gate in Leh you just take a taxi to Choglamsar and then another from there to Thiksey or to Shey which is also by the river, and each section only costs 20 rupees. I had been intending on leaving early but the hotel had other ideas on that. Most of the restaurants in town are closed in winter, and there's basically nowhere to eat in the morning. The hotel provided breakfast from 9am. On my first morning (day two) I had asked for breakfast to be at 9am. At 10am I finally went out and asked where it might be, and the response was "do you want breakfast now?". Second morning I had told them the night before, then at 8am in the morning to be sure, then 9am again. I finally got it at 9.45am. Mornings are not a strong point in India.

At the Main Gate I got a taxi to Choglamsar straight away - they leave every ten minutes or so, and the trip only takes fifteen minutes - but once there I had a fifty minute wait before there were enough people to leave. I think this was probably because it wasn't early morning. It didn't really matter because it wasn't like the day was going to get too hot for birding!

The taxi dropped me at the entrance to the monastery in Thiksey (it's quite impressively built, more or less, on a cliff face) and then I realised I had no idea how to get to the river. I knew where it was but the roadsides were largely blocked by walls. I started walking, asking along the way, and after a kilometre or so found a narrow side-road which led to the river. Everything was covered in snow, and there were little animal tracks everywhere. Hares, pikas, something small like a mouse, even a fox. I didn't see any of the mammals but there were accentors all through the trees. Most of them were black-throated accentors which I thought were buntings initially (google them for a photo and you'll see what I mean), but also a couple of pairs of robin accentors and brown accentors, both of which I had seen last time I was in Ladakh. A bird I did not see was ibisbill. The only part of the river I could get to was a stretch of about a hundred metres which was deep water covered in a slurry of ice which made a slushing noise as it flowed. Ibisbills need shallow stony water for foraging, so this was no good. I have seen ibisbill before (in Assam in 2014) so no matter.

The next morning I headed up to Rumbak.

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So, I had been anticipating bone-numbing cold as I ascended the Rumbak Valley. Five hundred metres in altitude must be a lot in the Himalayan winter. I had even plaited my beard to keep it from freezing into a block of ice (the day before at Thiksey my breath was settling on it and turning into little balls of ice, and it ended up like a Christmas tree). Bah, I had to actually take off a couple of layers of clothes as I walked. Stupid Himalayas.

I spent the first half of the day in the Husing Valley, snow leopard central at this time of year, before heading up to Rumbak village. There was a small herd of bharal in the Husing but nothing else. The little river up the Rumbak Valley was frozen solid so there wasn't even its mocking laughter to break the silence.

At the village I went to the homestay I had been at last time but they weren't there that day so I stayed at the next one along, the Thakskan Homestay. The daughter Angmo spoke good English which was a bonus. This family had very little in their house, unlike the other one with all its rugs and tables and dressers. Without wanting to sound "superior" I felt like staying at Thakskan was a much better use of my money because they obviously had less than some of the other homestay families. (Whispers: the food was much better too!).

I spent all of the next day in the Husing Valley and saw nothing at all there except the same herd of bharal. While I was up there a group of three Thai snow leoparders arrived at the Goba Homestay in the village. And when I came down from the valley at the end of the day I discovered a group of eight Swedish snow leoparders had also arrived at the campsite (at the mouth of the Husing Valley). They were all up on the viewing point right above camp. The presence of tour groups with all their designer gear and scopes and support crews kind of ruined the atmosphere I had last time. Now I felt less like the intrepid adventurer and more like the crazy homeless man wandering round in the mountains yelling at rocks. Actually I had seen my reflection in a window as I walked through Leh the other day, and I did look like the classic hobo of American movies, with the hooded jacket from under which pokes only the brim of a cap up top and a sprawling beard at the bottom. And not the harmless drunken kind of hobo who thinks some guy just fell out of a ball of light and stole his pants, but the stabby kind of hobo with the deranged look in his eyes.

I waved at the Swedes as I passed by below and considered going up to say hi just in case they had seen something, but they were mostly just standing around (rather than looking through their scopes) and it would have taken me half an hour to get up to where they were so I kept going. Half an hour doesn't sound like a big detour but it's over an hour back up to the village and you need to make sure you're back there before dark. The next morning I met them and found out they had seen a snow leopard...

To make that a little easier to swallow, it turned out that the cat was so distant that it couldn't be seen with the naked eye, it was only for a few seconds as it crossed a ridge, and only half the group saw it. I spent half the day with the group (there are limited "best vantage points" so everyone does tend to end up in the same spot) and while talking to one of their spotters found out some disturbing news for potential snow leopard hunters. In my last post I mentioned how Leh hardly gets snow in winter now because of global warming, and it is the same higher up. The Husing Valley area used to be under snow every winter, now it rarely is. Same at Rumbak village; rarely any proper snowfall. Up until maybe three years ago the Husing was pretty much guaranteed for snow leopards. Every two or three days there would be a cat somewhere right near camp. Now the majority of groups leave with either no sighting or only a distant one, whereas it used to be the total opposite. They can obviously still be found higher up, but in winter the oxygen levels drop so going higher is more difficult than in summer. The days of easy snow leopards at Hemis seem to be largely over. Of course luck plays a large part still: in December there was a kill right above the lower campsite - there were no tour groups there but for ten days the snow leopard was easily viewable. The spotters were showing me photos and video they took with their phones! I missed it by a week.

Speaking of spotters and tour groups, something I noticed with all three groups I encountered (a group of seven Belgians arrived later) is that few of the participants made any efforts on their own to look for the snow leopards. A very few individuals would stand there scoping, but mostly the spotters were doing all the work while the foreigners just sat around and talked. It was a depressing example of how some people go nature-watching. Pay someone else to do all the leg-work and then reap the rewards. I mean, that's fine if that's your thing but for me it would be so hollow. I like getting the rewards off my own back.

It's really a bit of a guessing game as to where one should go to look for the snow leopards, especially considering what I had been told yesterday. So the following morning, on the advice of the spotters from the Swedish group, I stayed up by the second campsite near the village. The Thai group were there too and the Swedish group arrived later. The temperature up here is around minus twenty Celsius at night, and it takes a long time to get anywhere close to zero during the day - especially on the hillside where I and the Thai group's spotters had parked ourselves. It was on the opposite side to the rising sun, so remained shadowed until around noon. Even for me it was cold! I was wearing two pairs of woollen socks over a pair of thermal socks, and my toes were still complaining. No snow leopards were seen but it was a three-gamebird day, with Tibetan partridges in with the regular chukar around the village, and Himalayan snowcocks on the hill opposite.

The Swedish group spent their next couple of days back down at the Husing (and didn't see anything). The Thai group wavered between the Husing and the village area (and didn't see anything). The Belgian group which arrived two days later stayed in the Husing (and didn't see anything). Things were not good for anyone.

I tried the Yurutse area next. There are lynx up there and it seemed just as likely for snow leopard as anywhere else. Yurutse is a one-building village about an hour further up from Rumbak. The yellow dog was still keeping watch from the top, as per last time I was there, and there were more Tibetan partridge in the field out front. There was just as little snow as everywhere else, although the mountains beyond were gleaming white.

I didn't go much past the first base camp which lies beyond Yurutse. I had hoped that maybe the argali might still be around higher up given the lack of snow, but one of the spotters told me the herd never came back over the pass from last year and there was maybe just a lone male left. So instead I sat by the base camp and kept an eye on the valley in case a lynx went past. Forlorn hope, but they are there and I thought maybe they might be more active by day during the winter. There were certainly still a lot of woolly hares around the place.

After a couple of hours I thought I might go a bit higher. I got to the start of the vegetated part of the valley (low red shrubs) and saw something yellow quite far ahead. I got the binoculars on it and my first thought was "how did the yellow dog get up there without me seeing it go past?" - then I saw a second one up behind the first one. I am really glad I saw the second one, because otherwise I would have just dismissed the first one as the yellow dog and turned my back on it. But two together meant it wasn't the dog from Yurutse. You may recall from the last visit that before coming to Ladakh I was a bit concerned about safety because the state has a huge feral dog problem, with people regularly being attacked and in the Nubra Valley area even being eaten by packs of dogs. On my last visit I found the dogs around Leh to be harmless (at least by day) and hadn't see any in the Rumbak area apart for a couple of harmless house-dogs. But these two were well away from the village. I glanced around for higher ground from which I'd have a chance at defending myself, but there was nothing which a dog couldn't also get to easily. I couldn't run at this altitude, and I wouldn't have a hope of fighting them off if they attacked.

I took another look at them through the binoculars to assess the situation. The one behind, the larger one, had seen me, was staring straight at me. But I breathed a sigh of relief. They weren't yellow dogs - they were yellow wolves! I'm scared of dogs, but wolves are fine. In fact I had actually been hoping to see wolves, I just hadn't expected them to be yellow. The wolf which had seen me turned around and trotted back the way it had come. The smaller one didn't realise and kept coming. Then it stopped and looked back, looked forwards, looked back. I could almost imagine it saying "hey, what's wrong?" to the other one as it left. Finally it saw me, and also turned and left. Not running, but at a quick walk. Very cool indeed. My first wolves. I even got photos, which (after super-heavy cropping!) can be identified as wolves and not just fuzzy yellow blobs. Also I didn't die, and that's always a bonus.

The next day the Thai group left. They never saw a snow leopard. The Belgian group also left after just a couple of days. They never saw a snow leopard. I watched the hills around the second campsite all day, no snow leopard.

In the night it snowed. In the morning it was still snowing. It was only the second time it had snowed at the village all winter, and the first time had only been a dusting. I went up onto the hill anyway. It was my last day and I didn't want to waste the hours, but the falling snow made anything past twenty metres invisible. All that happened is that I turned into a walking snowman. I went back to the homestay for breakfast. The taxi was meeting me down at the road at 2pm, but I couldn't do any watching until then because of the white-out. Very frustrating. At noon I left for the walk down. I passed the Swedish group coming up - some had already gone back to Leh, and the rest were staying their final night in a homestay. They hadn't seen anything since their initial fleeting glimpse on the first afternoon. In fact I think I was the only person who had seen any other mammals apart for the flocks of bharal (I had seen the wolves, woolly hares and a single large-eared pika).

I really hope they did see a snow leopard on their last day, and I genuinely mean that. It was hard work up there. I just wish I'd gone up there three or four years ago when seeing them was a good certainty.

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Photos

Tibetan Wolf (Canis lupus chanco)
this is the larger one of the two

Tibetan Wolf (Canis lupus chanco)
this is the smaller one, which left last.