Over the Mountains to Nubra and the Changtang

The town of Leh is a collection of cultures, and the capital of Ladakh. The people are primarily Ladakhi, but the place is polyglot, with lots of downcountry Indians from Punjab or Haryana conversing in Hindi, Muslims from Kashmir gathered around the mosque speaking Urdu, Tibetan refugees selling handicrafts lining the Main Bazaar, and a sprinkling of foreign tourists bargaining in English. There are rug shops, cafes catering to Western tastes (pizza, pasta, burgers and fries), stalls selling the sickly sweet Indian snacks: gulab jamun, jalebi, barfi, kulfi. The place wakes up slowly, and goes to bed early. Perhaps in the summer season, when the road is flush with tourists, it stays up late, but now, in mid-September, the poplar leaves already yellowing, the pace is laconic. The most energertic things here are the school children inside the walls of the Moravian Mission School near our guesthouse. The dogs, dozens of them curled up next to the crumbling façade that contains the State Bank of India, can’t be bothered to lift their heads at a passerby. A line of soldiers stands outside the bank, not to protect it, but to get cash to spend on diversions while posted up here in the hinterland. A few of them are Ladakhi, most are from elsewhere in India.

We spent a day and a half, washing clothes, bodies, eating touristy things, sitting in the room reading. Aymeric had an incredible facility for eating food, ravenous and eating up the scraps on our plates if they weren't completely clean; it was a marvel to behold. We had seen him eat 8 servings of dal and 12 chapatis in one serving. Cyclists (including myself) can eat a lot, but this was a singular achievement I had never seen before. I joked that if he could sustain this, he might become an honorary American.

The Dalai Lama came to town, and we watched a constant stream of cars, trucks, and buses go by, climbing the hill to a school above the town. The gompa, the fortress, the stupas around town, are not particularly attractive, but taken together, the place is quite picturesque. The view from the Main Bazaar (just a street in town, not the big dusty pavilion that the name might imply) is complex and intoxicating: a white mosque stands at the end, with the old royal palace of Ladakh’s ruling dynasty looming overhead, peeling facades with brave efforts at decorative fretwork housing carpet sellers, cows, donkeys and yaks meandering through the streets, monks in sunglasses and ochre robes picking their way past vegetable sellers arrayed on the sidewalks, squatting over the last of the summer tomatoes or hardy root vegetables to get the population through the winter. A shop selling curios has the words "More Junk Upstairs" painted above the door. In the alleys, the words "Do Not Urine Here" are painted on mud walls in black dripping letters, probably blithely ignored by passers by in need of relief.

The streets were crowded with soldiers one night; I complained to Martin that nothing was open at 8pm. “How can the capital of an entire region shut down so early?” Only we and the dogs were out. The following morning, as we started to leave, we looked for an internet café. Nothing was open at 9:30am, and soldiers in riot gear clustered near the mosque. A few shopkeeps peered out from underneath the shuttered storefronts. We gave up and headed towards the Khardung La, touted as the “Highest Motorable Road in the World” although Martin and I both knew better. I called back to the US, and found out why things were so quiet. “The whole state of Kashmir is under military curfew” I was told. It was puzzling that I wouldn’t have been told this by someone; clearly all of the locals knew this. “Don’t worry,” I said, “Leh is calm, and we are headed out into the Buddhist hinterland.”

The climb out of the town led past run down shacks, children kicking up dust. Winding higher, we passed through the outskirts of Leh, past buildings being constructed on the empty stony hillside. There was no water here, certainly nothing from the municipality; I wondered how these people proposed getting water. Maybe a water truck would come out this way for a fee, and fill up the plastic cistern on the roof, the kind that was common throughout Ladakh. Packs of dogs stirred up clouds of dust, melees breaking out along the roadside. The dogs in India, Ladakh included, are uninterested in passing cyclists, a radical departure from Tibet, where the canines viciously attack any two-wheeled conveyance, motorized or otherwise. The road rounded the valley and began to climb above a bucolic village, planted with trees and neatly fenced plots of grain. A few cows milled about, dark spots on the yellow and brown canvas spread out below. The mountains vaulted toward a blue sky, a few clouds non-threateningly floating by.
I stayed back with Martin, riding at a leisurely pace up the pass. The road was graded at a very easy five percent, and well-paved until the final six kilometers. From here the road deteriorated into a field of stones, washed out pavement, and dust. Military truck convoys, olive green and muscular, lumbered past us. I watched Aymeric ride on, never willing to get out of the way of a vehicle. I was constantly surprised, and occasionally annoyed, at his insistence on riding as if he were another vehicle entitled to the use of the road. In India, as in Pakistan or anywhere outside of Western Europe, a bicycle is expected to get out of the way. If I were in front, and saw a long string of trucks approaching, I would just pull over into the sand and wait, as trucks covered my in dust. Not so Aymeric; he charged ahead, past whining engines spewing black soot on him, blasting their horns, chomping at the bit to be able to race around him on a blind curve. I was willing to be the blade of grass, to bend in the wind, to lose a few seconds in exchange for a much better chance at survival. I mentioned his reckless cycling to Martin.

“Maybe it’s the helmet,” Martin replied. It was an odd pairing, the mad insistence on right-of-way combined with the cautious and consistent donning of a helmet. In all of my cycle touring in Asia and elsewhere, I have never met another cyclist who wore a helmet. I have, however, met plenty of cyclists who were unwilling to play chicken with a truck on a tiny mountain road.

I droned on at Martin while we climbed, talking about the book I had been writing with lackluster effort over the course of the past five years, noticing as I spoke that my own opinion of travel had changed since I had made the trip I intended to write about. Maybe the world has changed – it has – but I have also changed, struggling more and more with the purpose of travel. In Pang, a small collection of dhabas 200 kilometers before Leh, I struck up a conversation with a teenage Ladakhi girl, who was helping in a tent that her sister ran. She spoke passable English, and explained that she lived in Leh, going to school studying some sort of pre-medical curriculum. I applauded this, probably coming across as patronizing. She said “I like the life of foreigners, able to come and go, to travel everywhere, to see so many places. For you, India is so cheap, so easy.” This was not the first time I had heard someone voice a sentiment like this, but it was probably the first time I had heard it articulated so guilelessly. She was not angry, not resentful, but it struck a chord within me. In six weeks, what was I going to learn about this way of life? What would I take with me? What need have these people of me or my way of life? Her sister fixed me a breakfast for a pittance. I was embarrassed as Martin and Aymeric ordered seconds and thirds, and laughed about it. Of course this situation is complex, life in the West isn’t all good, but I couldn’t help thinking of myself and the others as an advertisement for a way of life that was unattainable for people here. Maybe a few of the trappings, yes – the cellphones, the jeans, the sneakers – but the cavalier attitude towards security, the smug assurance with which we travel, whether we are conscious of it or not, that permeates our consciousness, imbues us with confidence; these things are unreachable for so many of the people we come across on our travels.

“Yes, but there is adventure,” said Martin. “I need that.”

“Adventure” as a cure for boredom back home; it didn’t feel adventurous to me. I have become a curmudgeon. As the world shrinks, as things converge, as the have-nots get pale imitations of the products taken for granted by the haves, as the class of haves becomes global (“There are Chinese and Indian billionaires now!!”), as the inexorable efficiencies of capitalism penetrate to the furthest corners of the globe, offering up the same bland toothpaste I use to a child in Leh, branding tweaked ever so slightly to make a token gesture towards what part of “local” culture hasn’t been consumed by the global monoculture…I felt bored by it all, glum.

“Take some comfort in the mountains, in the desolation,” said Martin. This sounded so Danish. There are mountains and desolation a few hours’ drive from San Francisco; I rarely visit them.
Maybe I just wanted it to be harder. Vans with foreign faces staring out the window, giving us a thumbs-up, rolled past, kicking up dust, irritating my lungs. If everything collapsed spectacularly for me, here in Ladakh, I would need to wait at most ten minutes before someone would rescue me, either a good-natured traveler, or a local in a car. I could always wave money at the problem and it would be solved. The stream of thrill seekers, aka bored tourists trying to jolt their systems with a ride on the highest road in the world, depressed me, sent me further into my own head. I was happy to reach the top, to stand in the sunshine, freezing in a t-shirt.
Martin pulled out his GPS and took a reading. This insistence on figures and statistics annoyed me. Of course the figure printed on the sign of 5620m was preposterous, but who cares? It’s high, its cold, it took a while to get up here, there are big mountains all around with snow on them. He was fixated on superlatives; he couldn’t stand that someone might be in error, or boasting. Give the Indian roads people, the BRO, some artistic license, I said. An elevation is not art, he responded, it’s a fact. “5365 meters,” he said triumphantly, looking at his device. “Any fool with Google Earth knows better.” True, but why hunch over a computer screen, wheeling a mouse, scouring the globe for high roads? To what end? And then once you have ridden over them? Is there a fan club formed for you, or bragging rights? I had tired of meeting other cyclists, the stories of how high, how long, how far. I despaired, thinking of his data points plotted into Google Earth (what a dystopian name!): temperature, rate of ascent, elevation, spatial coordinates, logged every two minutes. Maybe if you attach an electrode to your temple, it will monitor mood, blood sugar, beta waves. My watchband had broken on the second day of the trip; I hadn’t bothered to repair it. The rising and setting of the sun was enough – we weren’t going to cycle in the dark. As for the elevation, it was what it was, wherever the road went. I didn’t care whether the pass was 5000 or 5300 meters; the point was that there was a road there, that people lived before and after the pass, maybe slightly different lives, depending on precipitation patterns, depending on where a border was drawn, depending on where marauding armies or advertising campaigns had left their mark.

As we prepared to descend, I discovered that my suspension fork had collapsed. I cursed, pulled off my baggage, and had a look. Completely compressed, and nothing I could do about it. I flipped the bike back over, reloaded it, and shrugged. “Well, shit. Let’s just get down.” The sun was setting, and we were up in the cold (“Freezing, actually,” Martin informed us). We descended the twilit side of the pass, in deep blue shadow, splashing through streams and puddles, crashing over rocks. We passed a few yaks, hard to discern in the deepening night. A few lights twinkled below, the army checkpoint at North Pullu. Aymeric and I raced ahead, my hands rattled by the stiff fork, his feet miserably cold in his cycling shoes. We had abandoned Martin again in our eagerness to get down off of the pass. We reached the base, a small collection of buildings and idled trucks, surrounded by ineffective barbed wire. Aymeric was chattering, claiming he couldn’t walk. I looked up at the small Buddhist shrine to our right, perhaps built for those of the soldiers who were Buddhist. I walked over to it; candles burned around images of Avalokiteshvara, the Fifth Dalai Lama, and a large picture of the current Dalai Lama. The door was tied shut, presenting little obstacle to our spending the night there. We waited for Martin, whose approach was announced by a barking dog. I said that I didn’t feel great about holing up in a shrine, but might be persuaded.

“Let’s just look around the corner,” I suggested. Aymeric was all for sleeping underneath the smiling visage of the Dalai Lama. We rolled around a corner, and found a restaurant. I poked my head in through the door, and asked the proprietor whether we might sleep on the floor.

I gathered that he said “You have a mattress and blankets?” and I nodded. He indicated that it would be no problem, that we could sleep on the floor of the restaurant. We were delighted, and ordered food in the dimly lit room. Soldiers from the camp across the street came in and out, buying snacks, a few ordering dinner. Several walked in wearing plastic mountaineering boots and huge parkas.

A friendly bunch, I asked about the boots. “Scarpa,” they said proudly pronouncing the name of the company that produced the boots. “We are going to the glacier to fight.”

Martin, again seized by a need for numbers and documentation, asked how long they would be there, how high it was, what was the temperature in the winter. These they answered as honestly as they could; Martin responded approvingly with “oohs” and “aahs”. “Minus 60? Wow! Six thousand five hundred? Wow! For a whole year? Oh la la!” It was a hard posting, probably one of the hardest in the world. Sitting up on a river of ice, gun in hand, waiting for the advances of your mortal enemy, who has also determined that this frozen piece of land was worth dying for, worth going to war for. I marveled at the stupidity of humanity, in particular our political class. India is the country in which half of the poorest people in the world live, a greater proportion than Africa, and here they were spending ungodly sums of money to hold onto a glacier in a region where the people had been denied a referendum on independence or self-determination for going on sixty years. Pakistan, on the other side of that glacier, was even worse off; beset by sectarian violence, a venal political elite, an economy that was completely feudal in nature, and now the country swept away by floods; yet more than a hundred thousand soldiers stood ready to hold back the advances of a military which spoke the same language and shared much of the same culture. The Pakistani side of the Line of Control is called Azad Kashmir, “Free Kashmir”; perhaps the irony of calling a place occupied by a hundred thousand soldiers “free” has escaped the mandarins in Islamabad.

We awoke to a bright morning, and descended to the village of Khardung, having a quick plate of rice and dal before dropping down to the Nubra valley, another 800 meters below us. Where there had been snow and freezing temperatures at the pass, we were now sweating in summer heat, well above 30 degrees. A village across the river, grey with silt, looked well-tended, orderly, a checkerboard of barley plots dithering out into the arid sand that collected in the river bottom. A small oasis grew up where a stream came down from the mountains, and then we were crossing a large stony plain, hemmed in by two mountain ranges. The road, unbelievably, was paved asphalt, some of it no more than a few days old. At the village of Agham the road turned up the valley of a tributary. No one was around, although a few cows and horses mowed the pasture in the valley floor. We stopped at a bridge to have lunch. A road led back down the other side of the valley, while our course lay upstream, to the Wuri La, a pass that Aymeric had been promoting for days. “I have seen it on Google Earth…”

A road marker stood chipped and marred at the junction; someone had scrawled “Pls do not go Panggong Tso, very dangerous, washed out 2/8/2010”. Martin fumed. “We have to climb two passes to get there, when there is a road along this valley for 35 kilometers going to the same spot?” He paced back and forth, cursing in Danish (I remonstrated with him; he had promised himself he wouldn’t curse anymore).
I shrugged. “What can you do? You could go thirty kilometers and find out that there is an impassable washout plunging into a gorge. Then you would have to turn back and go up the Wuri La anyway.”

“But maybe its OK now…Damn I hate to go up a pass I don’t have to.”

I chuckled at this; he had traveled to Tibet nine times, intentionally seeking out the highest passes he could climb, the most remote, checking it all before and after on Google Earth, reporting it on his website. It was a funny confession to make. “Really?” I wanted to say. Instead, I held my breath and listened to him rant.

In the end, since there was no one around to ask, we climbed the valley, stopping near sunset at a pleasant village above fields with yaks munching on dry barley stalks, leftovers from the harvest. Aymeric and I were waiting for Martin at the spur road to the village when a man goading two donkeys laden with green herbs stopped. “You can stay in the village, no problem,” he said in English. I made the decision immediately to spend the night in Tangyal, a place with an attractive gompa commanding a view of the valley. The donkeys moved on, depositing dung in the road. Martin arrived, agreed to spend the night with no prodding, and we walked the remaining few hundred meters to the village.

I crossed a small wooden bridge over a rushing stream by foot and wandered up the steep path that passed for main street in the village; the houses were crowded together on the hillside, just below the monastery. I asked a man if we could camp in a field. He offered us instead his homestay, which had a sign stating that it was “Approved by Wildlife Management Committee”. He was eager to show me the room, so I followed him past a small yard covered with a spongy mixture of dung and straw, up some stone steps, and into a room which had windows overlooking the fields. Several pots with geraniums stood on the windowsill, and a large poster of Lhasa adorned one wall.

“Great,” I said. He looked at me, smiling. I nodded my head. “I’ll get the others, there are three of us.” I said in my best Ladakhi “Sum” – “three” – backing this up with my fingers.

We spent the night in the room, eating a simple dinner while he watched over us, smiling. We climbed up to the gompa, which was locked and closed, and sat, watching the last light fade over the Ladakh Range ahead of us. Aymeric was calculating distances and elevations out loud; Martin sighed pleasantly. I took in a deep breath and descended. The host really wanted us to have light; he kept calling to his wife when the power fluctuated. Our single bulb was powered by a battery, charged by a solar cell on the roof. We didn’t care about the light; I tried to convey this but he was undeterred. We went to sleep with the light on. It finally flickered out, and I could see the stars through the window, the cold water noisily rushing below, the half full moon glowing on the ridge.

The Wuri La was a steep climb. I jested with Aymeric as we climbed. “Eight percent? Nine?” “Maybe ten,” came his reply when we reached a steep section. “Ou est Martin?” he asked. Martin slogged away behind us. Marmots poked their heads out of holes and scampered clumsily across the hillocks of grass, a few rabbits dashed across the road, which was still asphalt. We climbed all day, a brilliant sunny afternoon, and made the top an hour before sunset. Aymeric and I waited in a stone hut at the top, piled on clothes for the descent. I walked over to a shrine, a small concrete box that I could just squat in. A picture of blue-skinned Krishna, elephant-headed Ganesh, Krishna’s steed, and some other members of the Hindu pantheon was framed. Several sticks of incense were scattered around. I pulled out a lighter and lit a few sticks, placing them in holders just to pass the time, maybe to chase away the funk of three days cycling over passes.

After Martin arrived and made the obligatory GPS reading (“5308 meters” he said to me), we descended along swooping switchbacks, passing a herd of yak with no minder, and then down into a pleasant valley, just above the village of Tak Tok. We camped next to a stream, and the next morning made our way down past monks and schoolchildren to the junction with the road to Panggong Tso. “Ah, the Chang La,” said Aymeric. “It should be 5380 by Google Earth.” I sighed; where was the adventure in this, knowing in photographic detail where we were going? We breakfasted on thukpa and momo, meaty fatty dishes in Ladakh and Tibet, at a simple café run by a woman wearing a scarf. A BRO camp was across the street, and laborers wandered in, poking at our bicycles and ordering chai. I had some plastic wrappers from biscuit packages to throw away. I looked for a trash can, and the woman motioned for me to go around the corner. I saw nothing there either, and then another woman motioned me through a hole in the fence. A pile of garbage sat in a green meadow, next to a stream, with several dogs and a cow nosing through it, strewing it about. The cow looked up at me, grinding on a section of a cardboard box, obscuring its soft bovine nose with each chewing motion. I held onto my trash.

We climbed the Chang La, good road until a military post about two-thirds of the way up. I went in search of water there, and ended up with an invitation to tea and then lunch. Soldiers crowded around good-naturedly. One in particular paid attention to us, filling our glasses and plates. “Sudan,” he said, pointing to himself. “UN?” I asked. He nodded. “Yes.” One of his comrades said “Blue-hat!”. So he had been a peacekeeper in Sudan. “Khartoum?” I asked. Again, “Yes”. He paused, then added. “I like Khartoum. Nice city.” I asked him if he had been in Darfur. “Also,” he said. “Soldier from Bangladesh, Thailand, Pakistan, together.” I wondered what he thought of this, having served in the same unit as Pakistani soldiers, to now be standing at the ready, prepared to defend the Siachen Glacier from a Pakistani onslaught. There were soldiers from all over India, from Karnataka, Gujarat, Maharashtra, and one from Assam in India’s northeast, all stuck in a dustblown camp next to a road leading to the Chinese border. We expressed our gratitude and carried on up the pass.
The road deteriorated to a rough dirt surface, which had been torn apart by rockfall and landslides. The summer rains had wreaked havoc on the work of the BRO, as had the winter snows. I climbed slowly, methodically. Martin dropped back, panting. Aymeric fought the road, occasionally screaming out a string of French invective, moaning. The wind was biting. I meditated, concentrating on breathing steadily, thought about nothing, and reached the top. A sign indicating that the Indian army was giving out free tea pointed to a building. I stowed my bicycle and made for the tea. I sat down next to the soldiers, who were warming their hands over a propane heater. Aymeric came in, cursing in French. Some time later, Martin arrived. We dressed up again in warm clothes – I had given Aymeric my wool socks to help with his feet – and descended the tortured road. Two kilometers down, I hit a deep pothole too fast. One of my front panniers went flying. I stopped and picked it up. It didn’t fit on my rack. I looked closer; the clips had broken. I cursed, then thought “All is not lost”. This had happened to me on my first crossing of Tibet, 12 years before. I employed the same fix, tying the pannier to the rack with baling wire with Martin’s help, and carried on down in the growing dark. Aymeric had rushed ahead to get down and out of the cold. Martin and I descended together. We kept expecting to find Aymeric, but were soon riding in the dark. There was no traffic, the moon was up, and the air was getting consistently warmer. We found Aymeric, a dark shape on the side of the road, near the bottom, and continued to Durbak. A sign indicated a hotel, just next to another sign proclaiming in block letters “Ice Hockey: the Sport of Eastern Ladakh”. We all laughed, chuckling along the way to the guesthouse.

The next morning we made our way to Tangtse, through an army base where I stopped to watch a bowl in cricket, and then passed a sign stating “Golf Course”; an arrow pointed at a tract of land distinguished in no way from everything else around us – stones, dirt, sand. I began to laugh out loud. I wanted to take a picture, but the army is sensitive about photography near military installations, so I had to be satisfied with the memory. Perhaps it was the highest course in the world (4100m); it certainly had the largest sand hazard of any course I had ever seen.

We carried on to Tangtse and then to Panggong Tso, arriving in a thick wet snow that didn’t stick. The lake was shrouded in cloud, there was nothing to see. The army had another goodwill post, where they served hot drinks. There was an item “lunch” on the menu. We ordered three “lunches”. “No lunch,” was the reply from the smiling soldier behind the counter. “Only tea.”

“OK,” I said, “three teas.”

The tea came, we sipped it while watching the enshrouding white fall down around us through the windows, and then we left, finding no reason to stay. The soldiers directed us to a “civil camp” just down the road. There was indeed a camp, a few lines of canvas tents around a large dining tent, surrounded by a barbed wire fence. The tents were all tied closed, and no one seemed to be around. We made noise, called out; the snow kept falling. We discussed the ethics of just sleeping in the tents, all of us deciding that it was fine. Just as I was about to untie one, two Ladakhis showed up. “Can we help?” One of them was wearing sandals, chattering teeth behind drawn lips.

“Can you fix lunch?”

“Only Maggi noodle,” was the reply. Aymeric passed; Martin and I, on a less strict budget, splashed out and spent the thirty cents on a bowl of instant noodles.

Martin asked how much it would cost to stay there. The man in charge pulled out a price list and showed it to Martin. Martin’s eyes bulged. “It says here 3200 rupees for a night.”

“Food included,” interjected the man.

I laughed. Was this to be a thirty dollar bowl of noodles? The man was asking us to pay nearly seventy dollars to stay in an abandoned camp surrounded by barking dogs and a barbed wire fence. He smiled shyly.

It wasn’t his fault. He didn’t run the place, didn’t set the prices. We passed. Aymeric laughed scornfully, I smiled sympathetically. Martin just heaved another of his nearly constant sighs.
We cycled back past the military base, and on to a sandy patch of land. I pulled off the road. “This is as good a place as any.”

We camped there, in the falling snow, on one of the last days of summer. Aymeric went to fetch water. The clouds lifted slightly, the snow let up, and the place was actually serene. A few horses walked slowly near the lake shore.

“And tomorrow, the Marsemik La,” said Aymeric, gleefully. He had been on about this pass since we had met him, having seen it on Google Earth (where else?). “One of the highest in the world,” he kept babbling. The problem was that the place was not mentioned on the permit we had had to obtain in Leh, and it was within 10 kilometers of the Chinese border, a sensitive military area. Martin and I were both doubters. Aymeric was determined to make a go of it.

The next morning dawned free of clouds. The lake was turquoise against a dun-colored background. Snow had dusted the hilltops. Aymeric was ready to try the pass, Martin intoned in a low voice. “No way. It’s not possible.” I suggested they ask at the army post up the road. They rode away, I continued reading A House for Mr Biswas, determined to rid myself of one more book before leaving Leh for the south. When they returned, there was no clarification. “Those guys don’t know what they are talking about,” said Martin. “There is no commander there.”

Aymeric volunteered to check the other direction, to see if there was a checkpoint before the pass. After he set off, Martin and I talked, lounged about in the sun, which was hot. “A day at the beach,” I said, tanning my already tanned legs further. Several horses gamboled in the scrub near the lake; a group of cattle filed through our campsite, eyeing us suspiciously at first and then indifferently, dropping dung as they passed.

When Aymeric returned, an hour and a half later, he had a smile on his face. “It is possible,” he said. “But not now. I went to the checkpoint, 15km from here. I see the barrier. No one is there. I walk inside the base, still no one sees me. I am calling out ‘Hello!’ Eventually, someone hears me. They invite me in for tea, I show them my permit. Marsemik La is not there, they are sorry – not possible.” He smiled futher. “If you just cycle past, they will never know. You can go. And,” he paused dramatically, “they are making it asphalt right now. Next year, it will be the highest asphalt road in the world – 5580m!” Another superlative, but I indulged him. He was excited, and it was a little contagious. To celebrate the good news (and privately to celebrate that there wasn’t another pass to climb), we played a game of petanque, where his skills, honed in Provence, easily dispatched the Dane and the American.

We returned to Tangtse by the same way we had come, Martin muttering about hating to retrace his route. We camped just outside of town, thinking we would catch a bus to Leh the following day. We were wrong; the bus to Leh had already left when we arrived, and we found no other ride. We sat on the main street, watching nothing in particular happen for several hours, before getting a room at a guesthouse and walking to the local gompa, a nice structure on a prominence lit up by the setting sun. We walked in, eyeing the large phallus dangling from a wire over the entrance. This I had never seen before, in Tibet, or any other monastery. We snickered, then covered our smiles as we came to the temple, where a monk was reciting sutras and beating on a drum. We climbed to the top of the outcropping, and watched the sun set over the town and the military depot just below us. A gunnery range lay at the far end of town, juxtaposing Buddhism and militarism in this far corner of the world, forgotten by everyone but the two opposing armies and the people who have always lived there, minding their own business.

Back in town, I picked up a few papers to see what was happening in Kashmir. Newspapers are a good deal in India: at two rupees each copy, it’s hard to imagine a better price anywhere in the world. And there are many English language papers from which to choose. I went with the Times of India and the Kashmir Times. The Times of India, a national paper with perhaps the largest circulation – ten million daily, which is something the New York Times could only dream of – didn’ t have much to say about the crisis. A half page article, buried in the middle of the paper, mentioned that there had been over 100 deaths since mid-June. The paper of record in India was, however, full of good news about the economy, an article about justice for middle class homebuyers in Mumbai, a Sudoku puzzle. Above the fold on the front page, a short article reported that two tourists were shot by a suspected Islamist on a motorbike. There was considerably more information about Hollywood and Bollywood stars, who featured prominently on page two. The Kashmir Times was much more informative, running reports covering political prisoners, arbitrary detentions, the political process or lack thereof, army and paramilitary abuses at peaceful demonstrations. The army, the same one that had given me lunch two days before, was shooting into crowds of demonstrators, had been doing so for sixty years, killing 108 in three months. The list of grievances was long, most of them concerning the deplorable human rights situation in the state. Laws reduced to acronyms give the police and security forces wide powers and the ability to act with impunity; POTA and AFSPA (Prevention of Terrorism Act and Armed Forces Special Powers Act) have been used for more than twenty years to arbitrarily detain, imprison, and torture political and human rights activists. The world’s largest democracy reduced to a charade. Here in the crucible of Kashmir, the words democracy and rule of law ring hollow, as they do in so many other liberal democracies, reduced to a farce. When the population acts in accordance with the interests of power, they are allowed to exercise democracy, given protections, and allowed to believe in the notion of rule of law and an impartial justice system; when a segment, or even a single individual, acts against those interests, the veneer is stripped away, all the high sounding language of courts, due process, human rights, and international law is rendered meaningless, and we return again to the rule of force. What good is democracy when behind it looms the threat of force? Why this mockery of a trial, indeed. India, of course, is not alone; it is in the esteemed company of the US (USA Patriot Act), the UK (with its very own POTA), and other champions of liberty and freedom.

We secured a ride the following day, comfortable but very winding. We passed signs from the BRO again, more lascivious than before: “I am curvaceous, take it slow” and “I like you darling, but not so fast”. The philosophical reappeared on signs: “Life is a limited company with unlimited dreams”. Couplets intoned warnings: “Speed is a knife/That cuts life”. Alliterative mnemonics were painted on rocks near bends: “Alertness Always Avoids Accidents”. As we approached Leh, we passed a line of cars being washed, and women beating clothes on rocks in a stream. A large sign stood next to them: “Thank you for not washing cars nor cloth in stream.”
We entered the hotel, I put my book in the library, having finished it, and walked back up to the same room, with the same view of the mountains, the mountains that we had now crossed four times in the last seven days, and slept early and deeply.