The Spiti Valley

We arranged to take a van to Koksar, at the junction with the road to the Spiti Valley, and begin cycling there, the last segment of our bicycle ride in India .This van was set to leave at 3am “tomorrow morning”, which I tried to clarify with the driver. Does “tomorrow morning” mean what we would refer to as “tonight”, or does it mean the following night, sometime after midnight and therefore actually two calendar days hence? I struggled with this for some time, and called the man's cell phone to reconfirm in the evening.

“Tomorrow morning, meaning after midnight tonight?” I asked.

“Yes, after midnight,” he said.

I badgered him. “After midnight this night, tonight, not tomorrow night.”

“Yes.”

The phone connection was poor, I could barely make out what he was saying. I eventually let it go. “It must be tonight,” I told Martin.

We left the hotel at 2:15am, riding through the chilly, thoroughly dark streets of Leh, with only ourselves, the myriad street dogs skirting the pools of light cast by our headlamps, and a few diminutive donkeys chewing on cardboard boxes (this passes for fodder among the ungulates of India, I suppose). We arrived in the bus station, which had been wrecked by the flooding six weeks earlier, picked our way past garbage, rubble, and the twisted morass of rebar separating the lot from the road. A few voices could be heard in the dark and even a light or two. We approched them, and found one van completely full.

“Manali?” I asked.

The driver shook his head. “Not tonight – we are going to Kargil.” This was in the wrong direction, towards Srinagar and all of the action in Kashmir. In more peaceful times, perhaps this would have been an option, but we were also interested in cycling through the Spiti Valley as a way to wrap things up in the Himalaya, and regardless, there was no room. The van began to pull out; I groaned.

“Another day in Leh...I don't think I can do this.”

Another vehicle was stirring. Inside were several people, groggily trying to stay awake until they were underway. We walked over to the vehicle.

“Manali?” I asked, expecting to be rebuffed.

“Manali, yes.” An energetic man from Nepal in a faux leather jacket ran around, encouraging us, telling us not to worry about the way in which our bicycles were secured to the roof, that all was well with the world at this hour. We arranged a price, more or less what we had arranged for the van, including the bicycles tied to the roof. This was a considerably smaller vehicle. We would be sandwiched in tightly with several locals making the journey. Our panniers were thrown underneath the men who were now crouched in the back amongst the luggage.

I sat in the middle of the second bench, Martin took the door seat. Two men slumped over on top of each other, and after some time, they slumped on top of me. I wandered in and out of sleep as we climbed up over the washed out road that led to the top of the Taklang La, reaching the summit almost at the moment the sun crested over the horizon, bathing the whole snow-clad thing in a pink-orange light. We had a view back towards the Indus valley and the mountains that backed Leh, and forward into the plains near Pang, a dry brown place with ice-encrusted riverbeds and a few shepherd's tents. We stopped for a few minutes while luggage was tied more securely to the roof. Men got out to urinate, and stamped their feet in the cold.

Back inside, the driver navigated the inchoate route that had been drawn across the plain by passing trucks, since the roadbed itself was being upgraded. We plunged through dusty undulating grassland, stirring up a great plume behind us, coating the faces of the Bihari laborers that had been brought in to construct the new road. As the day wore on, we erased several days worth of cycling in the space of a few hours, noting the places we had camped, where we had stopped for lunch, where Martin had gotten a flat. By the afternoon, I was feeling pretty good, sure that we would be getting out at Koksar before sundown, and would be riding off to the east, the setting sun behind us casting long shadows in front of us.

This never happens; it is never this easy. I had been lulled into foolishly thinking that everything was going smoothly, that this would really be as simple as sitting in a jeep for a dozen hours. I had let my guard down, seduced by the oft-paved road, the string sections of the Bollywood dance songs. Shortly before the Barlacha La, a loud noise issued from underneath the jeep, and then a horrible grinding sound emanated from below my seat. We came slowly to a start.

A flat, I thought. No problem, this is just a small setback, maybe thirty or forty minutes. Martin opened the door, and got out. I followed him. The Nepali man was squatting down in the dirt, squinting at the undercarriage, puzzling at the rear tire, which was being squashed by the chassis.

I looked under the jeep. The rear left-side strut had broken completely into two pieces, and one of the pieces was now jammed up into the chassis behind the wheel. We were clearly not going anywhere soon. The driver, a soft-faced man in a black fur cap who was perhaps more an adolescent than an adult, barely able to muster a patch of hair around his chin and a few whiskers on his upper lip, got out the jack, and lifted up the jeep. They removed the tire, and stared at the struts for a minute.

The woman who had been sitting in the front seat left, walking with purpose up the road towards the army base three kilometers away. Here was a person of action; I admired this determination to do something. No one else was seized by this need. It seemed symptomatic of India. On the other hand, no one complained, there was no grumbling. A stoic acceptance settled over the group. Others milled about in the cold sun. I picked at pebbles, tossing them idly down the slope at the marmots who occasionally emerged from their warrens underneath the meadow below us. The driver eventually flagged a passing truck. The Nepali helper explained that he was going to the army base to look for a mechanic. If that failed, he would have to go to Keylong, probably 5 hours from here, to find someone to fix the jeep.

“I will stay with the jeep,” said the Nepali.

Over the course of an hour, the other passengers peeled off, singly or in pairs, hitching to the next settlement, the tea tents at Bharatpur. The woman returned, grabbed the hand of the boy she had left with us, and confidently got a truck. “I am going to go to Keylong – no point in staying here.”

After an hour, I agreed. There was no point in staying with the jeep, other than to safeguard the luggage, and the Nepali could just as well do that. Martin and I stood out on the road, which was now in shadow and rapidly becoming cold, and flagged a passing truck, along with another passenger, a Ladakhi man from Leh.

The truck driver, a thin man in a black turban and bushy beard, cocked his head to the side, the gesture of acceptance or aquiescence in India. We climbed in, the Ladakhi man first. I got in second, jumping up onto the step and grabbing the nearest piece of metal, the attachment for the mirror, and promptly pulled it out of alignment. The driver scowled at me, began barking at his helper, a cute dark-eyed teenager, in Hindi, correcting the error I had just made. As I scooted in, I was again chastised because I had almost put my feet on the shrine that was erected in the front of the cab; the driver shoved my feet forcefully out to the side. Martin piled in after me, the assistant slammed the door shut, and we lurched up the road, throwing me into the back of the cab.

Once I had adjusted myself, I had the time to assess the world I had entered. The cab was taken up by a large matress, plush and dark blue, on which I now reclined. The windows were framed by wood carved into ornate arabesques, and mirrors glinted in the light along the rear and sides of the cab. In front of me, where I had almost placed my feet, was a large shrine to a guru, a benevolent looking man with a smile and a white beard outlining a round face. The shrine stood in the middle of the windshield, a large construction that was perhaps a foot and a half wide, running from the floor to the ceiling, with several layers housing images of the man, some incense, and pictures and text glued to wooden panels. It obviously blocked the view of the driver, who wouldn't be able to see out to his left very clearly, obstucted and distracted by this smiling visage wearing an orange outfit. A panel with switches dangled half-anchored to the side above the driver's head. He threw a switch, and the beat of fast-paced raga lept out of the speaker behind my head at an ear-splitting volume, horribly distorted, warbling from the cassette tape in the dash. This is not unusual; a CD would never be able to play smoothly on the roads in the mountains of India, which are washed out, pockmarked with holes from fallen stones, or not surfaced at all. We raced up the road, our driver trying to catch the tanker truck in front of us – they were travelling as a pair, and the other one hadn't waited on us. The driver continued to bark at his assistant, who never said anything back, only mooned with his big beautiful eyes or tipped his head very subtly. We raced around corners, which tossed me from side to side, sometimes all the way down into a faceplant. The driver looked at me askance, muttering to himself. Now that I was perched up high in a cab, I could appreciate the road as it looked to the trucks that always came perilously close to us as they raced past us. The driver made liberal use of the entire road, sweeping around corners at what seemed to me to be a completely unreasonable speed, tailgating his fellow driver, nearly crashing into him when he would brake for a turn or a particularly large pothole. The driver began singing loudly out of key to the equally out of key music issuing from the stereo (probably the wrong word – I am sure the music was monaural).

He ripped open two packs of gutkha and dumped the contents into his mouth, tossing the plastic sachets out the window, and began spitting every few seconds. These sachets are sold widely along the road in India, dangling at the entrance to stores and shops, used heavily by truckers and other drivers as a sort of methamphetamine equivalent (which would be too expensive for Indian truckers, unlike for their first-world brethren). Users end up with reddish teeth, stained by the betel nut and tobacco that make up most of the mix. My driver never smiled, so I couldn't assess how heavy a user he was. Apparently, millions of children are also addicted to the stuff, which sells for a few rupees a pack and is extremely addictive.

The ride, 20 kilomters and about as many minutes, was perfect. “This is the reason I am here,” said Martin. We were both laughing at our good luck, speeding up a road with a crazy, gutkha-fueled trucker looking out at spectacular mountain scenery through arabesques and glittering mirrors. Bharatpur came too soon, and we stepped down with regret, handing the driver twenty rupees for the favor he had done us. The truck sped off, leaving a cloud of dust, and us, standing in a much-reduced collection of tents. The settlement, such as it was, was shrinking rapidly. When we entered a tent for tea and to hide out from the falling temperatures, we were told that this tent was closing up shop in two days.

We spent the afternoon in the tent, eating some dal and then hovering over a charcoal fire. A couple from Manali ran the place, with the help of a young man from Bihar who did all of the manual labor. It was hard to imagine that this couple made enough to employ a laborer, but they did, which begs the question: How little is a Bihari laborer paid? These are the coolies of northern India. Every group of laborers on the roads that I had seen since leaving Dharmsala looked to be from Bihar, and most of the laborers on construction sites, moving heavy rocks and debris. An article in the Times of India had mentioned that some of these laborers were protesting because the government wasn't even meeting its obligation to pay them 2000Rs per month, which works out to a little more than a dollar per day. Private employers were doubtless paying even less, maybe subtracting lodging costs, which were the lean-tos and tents that sprouted along the side of the road. This guy here was wearing sandals in sub-freezing temperatures, washing dishes in bitterly cold water, fetching charcoal in the dark windy night. It was undoubtedly miserable work. One has to wonder at the conditions in his hometown that would drive him or the road laborers to take on hard manual labor in a cold place hundreds of miles from home for a dollar a day.

We fell asleep under piles of blankets, woken by a voice calling out “hello” through the night outside. This, I knew, was the Nepali. I woke up Martin and the man from Leh, and was gathered our things quickly, only to find ourselves urged into another tea tent across the street, where the men were drinking down slugs of whisky. The driver, I noted, was politely refusing, which made me feel generous towards him. I asked if we would be leaving. “Yes, yes, just as soon as I finish this...Have some tea.” The Nepali ordered chai, even though I had refused it. “No money, I pay. Why not? This has been a long day. I sat in that jeep all day, until the driver came back with the mechanic. You know how much it cost?” He asked. I shook my head. “18,000 rupees...Very expensive.” This was about four hundred dollars, a not inconsiderable sum in India, more than the Bihari laborers would see in a year of work. But, I thought, this involved bringing a mechanic from Keylong, five hours away, along with his tools and the parts to fix the jeep, in a taxi, and then put the jeep back together again in the frigid air and total darkness of the Himalayan night. It began to sound like a pretty good deal. Our bicycles and luggage were all still inside.

We left Bharatpur and climbed the pass, now dusted with snow. I watched the driver anxiously as we began to descend. We drove very slowly, too slowly, and I could see that the driver was fighting sleep. At this point, he had been up for at least twenty-four hours, driving most of the time in the dark. I considered buying him some gutkha at the next possible place, but there was nothing whatsoever around until we reached Darcha, some two or more hours later. The last section of road before Darcha hugged a cliff, plunging away on our left side several hundred meters to a river we couldn't see. The driver was nodding, the Nepali was babbling on and on, drunk and manic. One of the passengers who had reappeared somehow in the jeep was visibly agitated, worried that we would plunge off the cliff because the driver was too exhausted to drive. Martin was white-knuckled with fear, holding his breath at every turn and looking like he would leap over me and jump out the window. I watched the darkness sway in and out of view under the headlights.

“This is suicide,” he said. “He can't keep his eyes open.”

I mentioned this to the Nepali – the driver was unresponsive, and didn't speak English anyway. “No, no, he's fine. We will stop in Keylong.” This was unreasonable, I thought, and hardly a place to try to reach while risking death on the road. I argued forcefully for a stop at Darcha, which was eventually accepted. Martin was hyperventilating next to me, staring straight ahead with terror in his eyes as we swayed all over the road. I was also weighing whether it was worth dying to be a good sport, to go along with something that was clearly inadvisable.

Finally Darcha came into view, or rather not Darcha itself, but the trucks that were lined up for a half-kilometer before the stop, sleeping for the night. We pulled past these trucks and passed the police checkpoint, which was closed for the evening. The driver pulled over, slumped forward, and closed his eyes. The Nepali began coaxing him to drive on. I said “The driver has to sleep, its not safe to continue.”

“Just half a kilometer – we have to get away from the checkpoint, otherwise the driver will be in trouble because you didn't check in.”

For some reason this seemed reasonable to me, so I allowed him to goad the driver into starting the engine again. Then there was talk of Keylong; Martin overheard this and threatened to leave the jeep right then. The Nepali said “We can't stop here – rockfall danger.” There was evidence of numerous rockfalls around us, so we drove on, and soon, the Nepali was suggesting Keylong again. I put my foot down, and at the next open area, I said we were stopping. Martin seconded this forcefully. The driver, who hardly knew his own name at this point, stopped when I motioned for him to do so. I opened the door, got out, and said, “I am going to sleep on the ground right here. Let the driver sleep.”

Martin and I slept outside in our bags, the rest of the people inside the jeep. It was probably cold and uncomfortable – I slept soundly for four hours. We woke up near sunrise and drove on, the driver now talkative and rested. We made Keylong as the sun came up over the mountains, and by mid-morning, we were in Koksar, unloading our things. I gave the driver a tip, telling him to get some sleep in Manali. He said he had no plans to go back to Leh this year. I shook his hand and wished him well.

Both Martin and I heaved sighs of relief as we sat down to eat in Koksar, and felt bright and positive as we climbed to Gramphu and the junction to the Spiti Valley. At the collection of dhabas that comprise Gramphu, I was asked to be in photos with several Indians from Mumbai, and spent the next ten minutes trying all of the different permutations and combinations possible for that group of people and myself. After we left these fine folks, we were all alone on the road, a sparsely travelled stretch of pavement that became dirt and stone after we crossed the river and began climbing slowly. We camped in a grassy meadow just down from the road, and awoke in the sun the following day with a bus stopped above us and a line of men standing over us pissing in our direction. “No dignity,” Martin muttered, scowling and turning away, while I laughed.

The only pass standing in the way of our finishing the ride was the Kun Zum La, at 4500m a low and easy pass that took a couple of hours to climb. On the other side, the Spiti Valley waited for us, a handful of villages and towns strung out along a high mountain valey in the rain shadow of the Himalaya, Tibetan in culture and language, and incredibly beautiful in the fall, with poplars and other deciduous trees turning bright yellow along the river bottom and up the slopes above us. Unfortunately we were in a hurry, so there wasn't any time to dally. At Kaza, the district capital, we had to apply for permits to the area close to the Chinese border. We were directed to a nondescript building in the “new” part of town. We took our place in a line populated by a group of women. Martin went upstairs to find the office, while I minded our bicycles, watching the women sit around and knit. Men came and went, everyone knew each other, and no one was in any rush. I waited for two hours while Martin was upstairs. He finally emerged with our permits, and a smile.

“Those copies of passports and visas we had to give? Some were used to serve cookies with, and others were used to wipe up spilled coffee. In the end, I don't think they even filed anything. But – we got the permits for free.”

We cycled on to Sumdo in the afternoon, rushing past the impressive gompa at Tabo and then through an impressively narrow gorge where the Spiti River bends sharply at the Chinese border, turning first south and then back on itself towards the west after it joins the Sutlej flowing from Tibet.

We reached Sumdo in twilight, and I stumbled around the place, which consisted of a few broken down buildings, some shanties built of scrap metal, and a small army post, leaving Martin by the road in the sand. I was told there was a guesthouse, but I couldn't find it, after walking back and forth through the settlement twice. Finally, I gave up, walking back to Martin to tell him there wasn't a guesthouse.

When I found him, he was smiling. “Yes, there is a guesthouse, but it was just rented out five minutes ago, while you were looking for it.” He indicated the building he was standing next to, unlit, and unsigned. “That's it.” The chowkiddar was outside, offering a bed to one of us in his room.

“But there are two of us,” Martin said. The man continued to insist that one of us could stay in the room. Another man in a track suit was standing in the dark. He spoke up in broken English, saying he had an empty room in a building that was very simple, but we could stay there if we wanted. I said that was fine, or we could just sleep outside in the dirt. At this point, well into the night, it made no difference to me.

The man showed us the building, an old dorm for road workers that was empty save for dust and some construction materials. Martin and I said that this would be more than adequate. The man brought in some other people, who put down some foam insulation panels on the ground for us to sleep on, and he wired up a light bulb. He then brought us tea and invited us to dinner. In half an hour, we were sitting on a bed in a small concrete room with three men, listening to one of them play the tabla, while another explained in English who they were.

“We are the BRO, the Border Roads Organization. We build the roads along the Indian frontier, in Rajasthan, in Ladakh, here in Spiti, in Sikkim, in the Northeast States. Part of the Army.”

He was from Kolkata, educated in civil engineering, and keen to express that people from Bengal have a love of art and culture. “You must come to Kolkata, there you will see art and culture, beautiful things.” I didn't doubt it. Although Calcutta is known because of Mother Theresa and one of the early rebellions against the British colonial rule of India, it is also the home to a vast and diverse collection of artists and film makers, a cultural wellspring for India away from the commercialism of Bombay. I told him we wouldn't have time to visit on this trip.

Conversation turned to India in general; our host lamented the state of things in India. “No one does anything they don't have to, there is a lack of ambition here. There is a fatalistic attitude here, perhaps related to religion. We Indians, we live like donkeys.” He grimaced. I was surprised someone would say something like this to an outsider. I told him that we in the West also often lived like donkeys, content to repeat the same steps, day in and day out, that ambition often reached as far as a new TV or car and not much further, that idealism had surely been driven out of us many many years ago.

“In the US, people are not overwhelmed with a desire to improve the lot of the entire community – they are content to live small-minded lives, tending to themselves and perhaps to their families if they are generous and think of more than themselves.”

He nodded slowly, then said “You have opportunities, maybe some of you take them. For example, you are here, on a bicycle.” He paused. “No Indian of your standing would sleep on the floor of that dirty building. You are great, open-minded people.”

I shook my head. “It is what is available. You have been very generous and kind to offer anything to two strangers passing through. I'm sure any Indian would think the same.”

He disagreed; I told him of the two cyclists I had met near Bharatpur, who I was sure would sleep on the floor of that building without protest. He said, “Those men are unusual, then.”

“Not every European or person from the US would sleep on that floor either. But there are plenty who would, and would appreciate it.”

We continued like this for several minutes, he complaining of Indian society, I trying to show that as people, we weren't that different, that luck had given myself and others like me the opportunity to do what I was doing, and people from India would do the same given my situation. At some point, our host said he wanted to leave India, perhaps for the US or Canada.

“A friend of mine from Kolkata, he went into the BRO with me. He hated it, couldn't take it, and quit after six months. He got together his papers, applied for a passport, and got a visa to Canada. Now he lives in Toronto. The gulf between his life and mine is enormous. When I can get a pension, in twelve years, I will do the same, leave for the US, UK, Canada.”

I wondered what sort of life his friend had in Canada. Even as a cab-driver in Toronto, his life was undoubtedly easier. These men were here, in a remote valley hard up against the Chinese border, building roads for the military, living in makeshift accommodations, crapping in foul toilets, no running water, staring across a mile of no-man's land at the Chinese military on the other side, who they conceived of as a wave threatening to break over them at any moment. But they were in the land of their birth, which counts for something.

We slept warmly and comfortably, and left the following morning after a breakfast with these men. The road followed the river gorge, which opened up near Chango, which had extensive apple orchards. At one of these, an old man was walking by and stopped me to ask if I wanted some apples. I said yes, and began fishing for money. Meanwhile, he piled up a dozen or more apples on the back of my bicycle. When I tried to ask how much, he waved off my question. “Nothing,” he said, as if I had asked a ridiculous question. The man walked away smiling, and I turned to Martin, telling him this was something you would expect to find in a tourist brochure somewhere.

Along the way, we passed camps of Bihari laborers, brought here to work on the roads that India was now expanding in its drive to further militarize the borders with Pakistan and China (and to offer alternative routes in case the situation in Kashmir spiralled out of control and severed the links to the frontier) - the present road was not up to the task, I had been told by the BRO engineers. These men, women, and children lived in shacks constructed of scrap metal, or lean-tos composed of a tarp and the branches from a nearby tree. Children ran out into the road covered in dust, or were attached to their mother's back while she moved rocks, swept away dirt, or perhaps cooked for the work crew. Piles of rocks stood at the road side, and atop these piles sat workers, hammers in hand, like convicts in a silent movie. The sound of metal on rock became a familiar one. Men and women carried rocks, assessed rocks, sorted rocks, broke up rocks, laid down rocks, lived under rocks. Here the massive disparity between the "developed" world and the "developing" world became very clear; it was not worth the capital investment to use mechanical rock crushers and graders, because labor was so cheap that it was more cost-efficient to hire hundreds of people who would spend months doing nothing but bring down a hammer onto a rock. Teenaged boys and men wielded huge sledgehammers, women made use of chisels and smaller hammers to break rocks into progressively smaller sizes. An entire nation seemed to be engaged in the business of rocks. This had the additional intended effect of employing large numbers of people who had likely been displaced from the countryside by the ongoing government-sanctioned or sponsored land grabs in Bihar and Orissa, or who were unable to provide for themselves and their families in subsistence agriculture any longer (again, often due to resource contention with mines, special economic zones, and other manifestations of "Incredible India"). But when all of the roads have been built (if it is ever possible to reach such a state), whither will these people go? To the slums, to join the ranks of the underpaid, added to the column of "assets" on India's balance sheet as a major source of impoverished labor, one of its competitive advantages in the global economy?

The road climbed up to a high village, and descended again into the gorge, which became incredibly narrow, giving one the sense that you were cycling at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. We reached the settlement of Spillo, and the final police checkpoint, in the darkness, getting a room at a guesthouse and taking off our boots for the last time – we were down below 2500m, in a warm fall climate, with perfect weather. Life was good.

Life was good, except for the unbearable construction zone that lay between us and Rampur, what would prove to be the end of our ride. We cycled in massive clouds of dust that never abated, as the road was being widened and at the same time a large dam was being constructed across the Sutlej River. This was a day and a half of miserable cycling, possibly the worst I have ever spent in many tens of thousands of kilometers of cycling. I was hacking all night, and Martin looked as if he had been beaten in the face by a baseball bat, so thick were the rings of dust around his eyes. There was no trace of joy on his face. His throat ached and he was sick. I longed to be out of this place. And just like that, the construction ended, we were rolling downhill through the last part of the Kinnaur Valley, and found ourselves in the heat of Rampur, its chaotic bus station, the swarm of people, of flies, of incessant traffic noise, invasive smells, packs of school children.

“We are back in India,” Martin said, wearing a tired look. We got a bus to Delhi that evening.