High and Dry: The Road to Ladakh

We left Manali under sunny skies, having bought a few provisions for the road. The town ended abruptly at the river, which was crossed by a bridge festooned with prayer flags. Just beyond the bridge we began to climb, an ascent that was to last the rest of the day and part of the next one. We passed through two Tibetan refugee camps, depressing places constructed of scrap wood and metal panels salvaged from trucks and cars, beaten into material for walls and roofs. This place didn’t resemble anywhere in Tibet. The residents had perhaps left behind a home, livestock, heirlooms; now they were living in squalid shacks hard up against a dusty road baking in the summer heat as trucks rumbled by day and night belching diesel exhaust into their living rooms. There was lassitude on the faces of young men, unable to pursue much of a livelihood in this foreign country; the ones that were better off sat astride cheap motorbikes wearing sunglasses, waiting with nowhere to go. A few shops held barren shelves, maybe a few sundries such as batteries and cigarettes. For this, they had fled their homes in Tibet, unable to endure the Chinese occupation, or perhaps they had heard stories of some El Dorado just across the border in India. It was evident to me that it did not exist. At least, I consoled myself, they could practice their religion freely here, they could hang pictures of the Dalai Lama here. Small comfort to me, but I am not a Tibetan.

A few kilometers out of town, as I passed another stretch of shacks, a jeep smashed into a large truck, one of the dozens or hundreds of “goods carriers” plying the road between Manali and Leh. The accident was not particularly violent; it had actually seemed to happen quite slowly. The jeep had been travelling at 15 or 20 kilometers per hour, and had run into the truck, which had stopped in the road. Perhaps the driver of the jeep had been distracted by the presence of two foreign cyclists, swerving and braking a fraction of a second too late. The impact was not severe – I even thought it might be benign, just a bent fender. As I looked over, I saw that the jeep had actually been crushed on the passenger side, impaled on the fender of the truck in front. The driver was dazed but looked to be OK. I dropped my bicycle by the side of the road and rushed over to the jeep. I yanked open the door on the driver’s side and called for him to get out (in a language he probably didn’t understand, but an open door is an open door). Behind him, a woman with a bloodied face was moaning softly; she had obviously hit her head against the back of his seat. I pulled open this door as well. Already, locals had come running to surround the jeep, urging the woman out. I looked inside; there was no one else in the back seat, but laying across the front seat was a boy of about eight, immobile. The rear fender of the truck (emblazoned with the same “Blow Horn” and “Use Dipper at Night” commandments as all trucks in India) had crushed in the engine block and crumpled the interior so that his seat was separated by debris from the driver’s side. The window was smashed out, the dashboard was mangled, and he was bleeding profusely from the head, unconscious. I rushed around to the passenger side, and tried to pull open the door. The car’s chassis had been deformed so that I couldn’t open the door; the cheap metal of the door bent as I pulled, but the latch for the door was immovable. Two others pulled with me as we tried to pry the door open, rocking the jeep. Someone from the other side was able to pull down the seat and get to the boy, removing him through the other side. A passing car was flagged down, and the boy was carried across the road, limp, and put in the back seat. The woman was crying through her bloody face; it was her son, I guessed. He hadn’t been wearing a seatbelt, and the fender and the glass had probably crushed in his temple as he had been thrown forward by inertia. The driver and the woman were hustled into the car, and, after a few trucks were moved out of the way, painfully slowly now that there was someone injured and maybe dying inside, the car threaded its way through traffic and left down the dusty road.

I walked back to my bicycle. Martin was in shock. I started to breathe heavily, staring out at the now quiet valley. The sound of the crowd faded at my back, and I just heard the rushing of the river in the rocky bed below.

“That was really bad,” Martin said. “I don’t know if that boy will make it.”

I nodded. “Goddamn it.” There was nothing else to say. I paused, then: “I wish he had been wearing his seatbelt. I wish the driver hadn’t been in a hurry. I wish we didn’t ride around in big heavy pieces of metal.”

We stood there, looking at the river, then back at the jeep. Someone was trying to get it started, moved out of the way. The crowd dissipated. After a few minutes, I shrugged mechanically, and picked up my bicycle. “Let’s go,” I said.

We rode quietly up the valley, which was pleasantly green, and curiously stocked with small wooden shacks offering ski suits for rent, limp, dirty, tired outfits that a lowlander might use to play in the snow. It was 35 degrees (95 fahrenheit); there were no takers. At the next village, we came across three Westerners on bicycle, taking a break at a junction, two New Zealanders and a Frenchman, lounging against a stupa. The kiwis were out for a day ride, testing the waters before cycling up the Rohtang La (the pass in front of us) and on to the Spiti Valley; the Frenchman was fully loaded, on tour from Kyrgyzstan, wearing a lycra cycling outfit and a helmet. We stopped to chat, and then climbed the pass together, weaving around waterfalls and forested hillsides on a good road, one whose traffic had dropped off considerably. It was idyllic, climbing in the mountains, listening to torrents of water throwing themselves off of the cliffs above us, knowing that we were leaving the heat and humidity of the plains behind us as we rode higher and higher. The New Zealanders stopped just short of the last collection of dhabas (roadside stalls) at 3300 meters (10,500 feet), mentioning a dinner appointment they had to keep in Manali. “We’ll be climbing back up here with our gear tomorrow,” they said. “Much less than you’ve got, though.”

The road became muddy and washed out, the asphalt disappearing for longer stretches until we finally left it for good. Martin fell behind, while the French cyclist and I talked. His name was Aymeric, a twenty year old from Haute Provence, a hill climber at home, and clearly an avid cyclist. We stopped just above a shepherd’s platform at 3600 meters and waited for Martin for half an hour as the sun set behind the monsoon clouds farther down the valley. Aymeric had started in Kyrgyzstan 5 weeks before, setting a quick pace through the country, although not fast enough to avoid being robbed twice.

“Yes, I lost one pannier when three men came at me with a knife. I make a lot of noise, but they got one bag, with my clothes.” He pointed at the mismatched pannier on his rear carrier. “I got this from a Belgian woman in Sary Tash; they were finished with their tour, so they gave this to me. I will mail it back when I finish.”

More than ten years earlier, I spent a month or more in Kyrgystan, hassle free, enjoying the hospitality of yurts, camping freely wherever I wanted. Now, the place was gaining a reputation among cyclists of a place where you had to be on guard. Attacks were not uncommon; others Aymerique had met had similar stories.

“And Pakistan?” I asked. This was a place that Americans were certainly warned away from; I hadn’t returned after 1999.

“Ah, lovely place, very friendly people. I never met such friendly people anywhere. The traffic in Lahore, though…awful.” He related the story of his birthday evening in Gilgit, somewhere I had been more than ten years before.

“It was like fireworks!! My birthday – perfect. I wanted to go out to a restaurant, but we were stuck in the guesthouse – the Medina, you know it? (I did; I had stayed there) – because of gunfire. Shia fighting Sunni in the streets. I think in the end only three died, but the newspaper reported 70,000 bullets were fired during the night.” Which reporter had counted the shells the following day?

The excitement, the invincibility of youth. He related the story with a smile. I have told plenty of hair-raising tales myself, earnestly and with excitement. I smiled with him, but felt melancholy at the state of affairs in Pakistan; three senseless deaths that had served no purpose other than to provide an edgy story to a few foreigners cocooned in a guesthouse named after a holy city in Arabia. “All I got for my birthday,” he concluded, “was a chapatti with sugar. The man did provide a candles, though.”

Martin arrived, and we camped, looking over the Kullu valley, on the cusp of Spiti and Ladakh. The stars faded in and out as the clouds gathered and dispersed. A light drizzle began to fall, and for the first time since arriving in India, I was underdressed.

The following day, my birthday, we summited the Rohtang La, at just under 4000 meters. The sun shone, and I labored up past the puddles and mud and sand that characterized the road. Construction trucks lumbered by, road workers called out “Namaste!”, and the countryside dried out dramatically. We waited again at the top for Martin, who was carrying 10kg more gear. I was happy to be able to keep pace with a twenty year old who was six weeks into his tour. At the top, I caught my breath and sat down next to the prayer flag draped pass, building a stone chorten to pass the time until Martin arrived. We descended rapidly into another valley, but remained above 3000 meters, following a river to a junction and then climbing to the capital of Lahaul at Keylong. The people were of mixed Tibetan and Indo-Aryan stock, with nods to each culture. The women wore shalwar kameez, and draped a scarf over their heads, but prayer flags fluttered in the wind, and the occasional gompa (monastery) was visible on the hillsides. Monks wandered down the single dusty street of the capital Keylong, which clung to a steep hillside above a river. I looked for an internet café, but found nothing. There wasn’t much to the town, and almost nothing else on the road until Leh, still some 350km and two passes distant.

We climbed over the Barlachu La, just under 5000 meters, in the cold end of the following day. I was still wearing flip-flops, a relief in the plains, but now a liability. My feet were freezing. Aymeric and I caught up with two Indian cyclists, cousins, one from Delhi, the other living in Massachusettes near Boston. The one from Boston was in cycling shorts; I nodded to him – I was also in cutoff shorts. Martin was nowhere to be seen. I was eager to get down; I didn’t want to spend the night at 5000 meters, in the cold, unacclimatized. Aymeric wondered about Martin.
“I don’t know whether he threw in the towel and stopped lower; he said earlier he didn’t want to stay high, and if he doesn’t make it here soon, he won’t be making it here at all. It will be dark in half an hour.” I didn’t like the idea of abandoning Martin, but I also knew that he could handle himself – he has spent considerably more time than I at high altitude, in poor conditions. After a few minutes, I decided to descend. “Let’s go. He will probably spend the night on the far side of the pass – we’ll see him tomorrow. I certainly don’t want to spend the night up here.” A light snow began to swirl around us.

We descended in near darkness, racing towards a group of dhabas that we could see in the fading light, a cluster called Bharatpur, although not deserving of the moniker “village” or even “crossroads”. The road was passable, good in many places, although the monsoon rains had clearly washed out many sections on the way down. I reached Bharatpur first, having come down at breakneck speed in the hopes of getting my feet into someplace warm. I stopped at the first tent. A man stepped out: “You want something to eat, drink?”

“Do chai,” I said. Two teas. Aymeric was not far behind. The man looked down at my bare feet and winced. I smiled. “Yes, they are cold.”

He urged me inside, where I could sit next to a wood stove. I massaged my toes back to feeling, Aymeric came in, and soon after the Indians, AJ and Sanjay. We swapped stories, talked about the road, speculated on how long it would take to reach Leh. Somewhere in the middle of all this, Martin came in, looking stunned.

“I almost camped on that damn pass, because I couldn’t see it. Thank God I realized I had reached the top; then it was just a matter of going slowly through the dark. We aren’t much lower here: 4700 meters.”

AJ and Sanjay had never toured before on a bicycle. Sanjay, from Massachusetts, hadn’t ridden a bicycle in twenty years, until AJ suggested the trip six months before. I marveled at this; the road from Manali to Leh is a pretty spectacular first ride, and moreso for someone approaching fifty. They were both good humored and talkative, AJ more energetic, Sanjay more laconic with a sense of irony. We stayed up for a couple of hours, and then turned in, hiding under several layers of blankets along the side of the tent.

We met two Swiss cyclists 5km down the road, waking up from their camp. Aymeric had corresponded with the man, Gaetan, several weeks before, to ascertain what the visa situation for Pakistan was at the border post with China. We stopped and talked shop for a while, as the two of them (the other was a woman, Nadine) packed up. The road descended to a small military post and a few tents at Sarchu, which lay in a beautiful valley, wide open, with a flat bottom carpeted with short green grass, a perfect meadow running alongside the mountains for several miles.
The following day we hauled ourselves up over the Nakhi La and Lachalung La, a double pass that held a Tibetan tent in between where we (Aymeric, Martin, and I) had lunch while the Swiss carried on up the second, higher, pass. In the tent, we tried to chat with the women running the place, learning a few words in Tibetan, and learning that they, too, were refugees from China, not Ladakhis. “Ni, chi, sum, shi, nga” she smiled as she taught me. “One, two three, four, five.”

We caught up with the Swiss at Lachalung La. They were celebrating with tea. “Our first 5000 meter pass.”

“Mine, too,” said Aymeric. Martin and I had been on countless such passes, but I hadn’t seen one in three years. I felt good – the headache from the previous day in Bharatpur was gone, I wasn’t laboring up the road. The scenery was beautiful, with snow capped mountains rising up around us at all sides, and the dry oranges, greys, and browns of the Himalaya soft against the clear, dark blue sky. A group of Indians stopped in a car and got out to take photos at the pass. One of them, a middle –aged woman, was wearing a San Francisco windbreaker, the kind one buys in Chinatown or Fisherman’s Wharf. I smiled at this tourist relic from my hometown. “My son lives in Seattle, we visited him there and drove to San Francisco. Nice town.”

I nodded. “Its home, anyway,” I said. “A pretty nice place to live.”

They gave us several apples and wished us well. We descended soon after them, through a very attractive and narrow gorge to a confluence of two rivers, where a group of trekkers were camped. Steve, an old hand from Lake Placid, welcomed us, and soon we were served hot chai in the stainless steel teacups characteristic of the subcontinent. “We trekked around for 28 days – it’s been a great time.” They had pack animals, guides, the whole thing, but I envied them the small trails, the clean air. Cycling, you are still confined, more or less, to a road. You cover more ground, of course, and your back hurts less, your feet aren’t sore at the end of the day. More efficient, in other words, but as I get a little older, I am not so sure that efficiency is what I am looking for.

The following days to Leh took us on a long detour, adding a day and 130km to the ride; the Taglang La, the highest pass on the main road, had been washed out since the flooding of early August, and all traffic was being rerouted towards the Chinese border, in the westernmost part of the Changtang, a place Martin and I were quite familiar with. High altitude, dry, sprinkled with saline lakes and nomads, we welcomed the opportunity to pass through an area normally burdened with red tape and permits. At the pass separating the lakes from the Indus Valley, we sat down at a tent for dal; an old nomadic woman approached us, and removed a few quartz or semiprecious stones from the folds of her chuba, along with a beaten brass spoon. Martin bought a stone clear, infused with a light purple; I bought the spoon. She smiled a leathery smile and shuffled off, stuffing the small amount of cash we had given her back into her overcoat.

The road was poor, miserable in parts, but we made good time, and found ourselves following the Indus Valley to Leh, back down below 4000 meters. When we crossed the river, we were met with a T junction. To the right, a sign (hand-painted – this is still a developing country) said “Absolutely no entry without Pemission – Violators will be prosecuted”. The road led to the Tibetan border; we turned left and headed downstream. Indian military installations lined the river every 20km or so, a reminder of the disputed border with China not far to the east. China, in the early 1960s, annexed a huge swath of Ladakh called Aksai Chin, and the resulting war and stalemate had cost several thousand lives and left a dashed line on international maps, with India claiming the territory while China built roads and bases on it. The Indian bases themselves were typical; barbed wire perimeters, ugly prefab buildings, cryptic acronyms on signs with indecipherable combinations of letters and numbers, and units with names full of bravado: “the Fighting Fifth”, “the Red Devils” emblazoned on gates, exhortations to patriotism and strength (“Always First”) plastered on billboards. All of this over some rocks and a few scattered people who wanted nothing from either side, just to be able to live their lives as they had always done.

We passed through a few agricultural villages, some magnificent monasteries surveying the valley and ripening barley fields, and then through the village of Choglamsar, which had been catastrophically affected by the flooding in early August. In one night, an incredible deluge sent millions of tons of rock and soil cascading down onto the village, wiping out large parts of the town, killing 800. The scene was still shocking 5 weeks later: people were still digging out their shops. A layer of mud, three and more feet thick, lie over the land, now blistered and cracked from the sun, smothering trees, choking streams. Debris and stones were piled high along the roadside, collapsed houses were visible in the wreckage. We passed through, staring at the destruction. Life, of course, went on; stores were open, auto-repair shops were busy beating dents out of cars, buses plied the road. This is one of the most shocking parts of disaster – life goes on. You want everything else to stop, to bring order to one’s life, to find the ground. But the rest of us carry on. Five minutes later, everything looked normal again; shopkeepers sipped tea, dogs nosed through trash searching for scraps of food. We carried on up the hill, passing through a narrow notch in a ridge, and entered Leh.

The town of Leh was a major stop along part of the Silk Road, trafficking good to and from Central Asia, Turkestan, India, and Tibet. The Chinese stopped this with the closing of the Sino-Indian border in 1949, the end of the Chinese civil war and nominal Tibetan and Uighur independence. Now the place trades in tourism and the ancillary effect of housing tens of thousands of Indian soldiers along the nearby frontier with China and Pakistan. We saw our first backpacker, a tall redheaded woman who turned heads crossing the street. Hotels and guesthouses proliferated, and then bakeries and cafes catering to Western travelers. We found ourselves at the northwest corner of the city, at the highest point, in a fairly pleasant guesthouse run by Ladakhis, with a healthy garden full of cauliflower, kale, carrots, onions, and potatoes. A hot shower, a wander around the town, and I almost forgot I had come here by bicycle.

Meanwhile, just over the hill in Kashmir, 300km away, seventeen people are dead yesterday because someone in the US threatened to burn Korans and the Indian military, occupying the province with hundreds of thousands of troops, had easy trigger fingers, adding to the pile of bodies and resentment that churns through this beautiful undulating fantastic land.