Return to Ladakh - Introducing Anand

Our time - A euphemism for extremely unreliable time estimates / extremely unreliable timekeeping (Source - the official Ladakh 2009 trip dictionary).

If you don't sleep at night, waking up early ceases to be a problem. But once you wake up, you still need to pack up the tents, clean up the campsite, and cold start the bullets in the thin air! When we finally got going at 7 "our time", we were 2 hours behind the scheduled time of 7 hours IST.

Chavan was already ill. Abby having not gotten his quality sleep was grouchy. And to top it, there was the rain; not a downpour or anything, but that steady persistent drizzle that gets under your skin. Suddenly, no one wanted to take photo breaks or smoke; all that we wanted to do was ride non stop till we found better weather, hopefully beyond the next pass. We wished!

Just past Nakila, we ran into a herd of grazing Ibex. That was our first stop for the day, and even that lasted only long enough to get a few photographs.

But knowing our history, it was time for something to go wrong :) Abby was complaining all along of his engine dying in idle, and just after Nakila it stopped again; and refused to start! Brute force kicking would never have worked, and it did not. As luck would have it, just when we were running out of ideas, we saw this lone rider come up from behind us. And he turned out to be just the person we needed.

Anand Ethirajulu, on his solo trip, had enough knowledge of bullets to help us fix the broken bike. It wasn't a major fault - just a change of the fuel mixture to adjust for the rarefied air - but left to ourselves, we probably wouldn't have got it right for at least another hour. It took us a few kilometers, some experimentation with the settings, and fixing a bad fuel supply tube before we could really get going again.

The rain had let up by then, but the sky was still overcast threatening to open up any time. We pushed on though, and did the remaining 25 kms to Pang in quick time. The landscape had changed meanwhile; we were riding through a valley with an ultra clear river flowing next to us. Everything around had gotten more stark, more dry, more rough, and nature was doing overtime in it's modern artist role; creating strange and varied formations out of the rocks.

Just before Pang is a small checkpost where you have to register your vehicle and riders. It's manned by a friendly policeman who has no clue what the weather is outside his tent. If you do have questions about the weather, you'd be better off asking someone else!

Pang itself is a small tent colony where you can get some grub and bedding for the night. They've got a cool socialist scheme going - even though there's fierce competition between tents for the food business, the proceeds from the accommodation business are distributed evenly between all the tent owners. Viva la revolucion!

Return to Ladakh - Deep freeze

The plan, day 3 - Leave at 0800 hours and ride the 200 kms to Pang. Take the ride easy; with more breaks and more photographs; soak in the view; chill out even while making the distance.

As things transpired, we got up in the morning, sat around chatting, had a heavy breakfast at the hotel, and when we finally got rolling, the time was closer to 10. Thankfully, we had already fueled up the night before, including picking up our spare cans of fuel; otherwise, we might have ended up doing only 30 kms that day!

The roads were pretty good and we made Darcha in under 2 hours, photo and smoke breaks included. Darcha is the point where the Bhaga and Barai rivers meet, and is the starting point for a lot of treks into the Zanskar valley. The ride was pretty uneventful except the one time when Chavan decided to switch gears. Suddenly, from riding easy in third spot, he was racing out in front of everyone else. For a moment, he seemed possessed. Till he decided to stop for 10 minutes to let an oncoming truck do the 50 meters between them and pass; the moment was over.

After a chai (or two, in the case of Manoj) at one of the many tea stalls in Darcha, we hit the road again. The road overall was awesome, except for the one water crossing, with the coldest water that we had yet encountered. We finally stopped for lunch at Zing Zing Bar, which is a total of 3 tents run by Nepalis; serving chai, maggi, and dal chaval. I doubt there would be a cooler named place in India (with the possible exception of Chutia, Assam; although some would dispute the use of the word cool in this case ;-)).

The Nepali dude at Zing Zing Bar decided Kavi was "strong" because she was wearing just a pair of trousers and a t-shirt in that weather, while the rest of us were all covered up in multiple layers! Well ... she obviously wasn't strong enough to do the striptease later on Baralacha La ... like a couple of us did! :) By the way ... any likeness to Somali pirates is purely incidental. For the record, there have been no reported sightings of Somali pirates anywhere in Ladakh.

Just before Baralacha la is the serene Suraj Tal lake; memorable to Kavi as the place where she touched snow for the first time. Baralacha La was the highest pass that we had yet done on the trip. Standing at the highest point on the road, all around are rolling hills checkered black and white with stone and snow. To the right is a stupa with thousands of prayer flags. The small hill to the left is covered in chorten (Stones piled to resemble a stupa; a symbol of thanks from travelers for their continued safety).

We hung around for sometime, even getting abused by a passing truck driver for parking our bikes in the middle of the road. Not true really, but he was probably just getting back at us for having blocked him in a bad patch of road on the up slope. He went sliding down some 10 meters before he regained traction there!

The road down from Baralacha is as bad as the road up to it is good. The landscape starts to get stark around here with hues of brown all around; loose rock and mud, landslides, and the like. The road meanders down about 30 kms before finally reaching Sarchu, occasion for a small celebration as we had finally hit J&K state, and Ladakh ... 3 years after we first set out!

Sarchu is where we see the Tsarap Chu river, strangely beautiful in the way nature has carved the gorge down from the grassy plains to the river. Look carefully, and you could see nature carving faces in the mountains around (No! I was not high on anything at this point. :-))

It did not look like we had a lot of daylight left. The sun was going down fast, leaving us no chance of getting to Pang for the night. We stopped after going only as far as daylight and terrain permitted us. It took us the better part of the available daylight time to set up the new tent, which we had to figure out how to put up (The damn packaging did not even have a picture of the thing for us to use as reference)!


Chavan was already showing signs of illness - a mix of food poisoning and AMS - and his sleeping bag was wet (A result of his new river crossing strategy - "floor it"). So it's 4 sleeping bags, 5 people, and biting cold - perfect recipe for a sleepless night. Abby probably had the worst of it as Kavi seemed more adept at tugging at the sleeping bag in her sleep, but we all had a pretty bad night although wrapped in full riding gear!

The best part of the day was just before though - the night sky lit up with a million shining lights. I remember nights spent at INS Shivaji in Lonavla that could compete, but I'm sure even that would be a distant second to this sky. It was the perfect place to camp ... if only we had been more prepared for the cold.

Return to Ladakh - The first hiccup

19-Jul-2009 0500 hrs our time. We were up alright, but nowhere close to getting on our way. It took us over a couple of hours to get everything packed, fixed up on the bikes, redistribute the bags to get the weight distribution right, and get on our way. And this was with the bungee cords. If this had been the last trip, the same exercise with regular nylon cords would have taken us twice the time!

If you are headed for Rohtang, there's a good reason why you should be leaving early. Come morning, and hordes of tourists hit the road for Rohtang. Most of them just go up there, click a few Patel snaps, ride a pony, throw snowballs at each other, and head back along the same road to Manali. There's also all the trucks that leave Manali to get across the pass to Lahaul & Spiti, or to Ladakh. On a regular road that would be fine, but the road to Rohtang (especially past Marhi) is just a slush pit in most places!

So we left late allowing all these guys to go up ahead of us, and the result was we ran into a HUGE traffic jam just up above Marhi. The traffic was standstill and enterprising locals were already there selling tea and bhutta. If you are stuck in a traffic jam though, a bike is the best thing to be on. We managed to sneak through between most of the vehicles, till we came to the problem spot. It was just one hairpin bend, but the road was only slush, about a foot deep. One of every 3 vehicles was getting stuck, and then there'd be all the pushing and revving to get it unstuck.

We thought we could go through, but the couple of cops present would have none of it! Everytime one of us tried to start our bike and get through, we'd hear this guy screaming abuses at us! Eventually though, with some effort, we managed to sneak past the cop, only to find out that Manoj's bike died on him and would now refuse to start! That feeling of disappointment rose up in my guts again. We tried a while but saw it wasn't working, so we called Anu for help. Anu remote diagnosed the problem to be a dead battery, and said he'd be there in a couple of hours with a replacement. So Kavi, Chavan, and me waited, while the other two headed further up to refill our water supplies.

I had a headache and was feeling a little woozy. Most likely symptoms of AMS, but I suspect it also had a lot to do with the situation and the disappointment. In retrospect I was jumping the gun, but at that point, I almost felt like it was a lost cause, like we might need to head back and try again the next day, or maybe try again the next year!

Nothing like that happened though. Anu came and replaced the battery, and we got started up and on our way. Kavi who was already drooling over the 'hot Anu', now also had him as her knight in shining armor and savior of her trip. We did not hear the end of it over the next few days! Half an hour got us to Rohtang, and after a quick snack of Maggi and chai, we hit the road again.

The roads are considerably better past Rohtang, and the traffic is almost nil. The road is pretty decently maintained, and the stretch between Khoksar and Sissu is especially good. Beautifully laid tarmac snaking along the river bank made this some of the best riding on the trip. We passed our campsite from the last trip and headed straight for Keylong, where we intended to stay the night. There was some bad roads, but as we realized over the trip - if you get past Rohtang, you've pretty much made it! We fueled up at Tandi (our last fuel source before Leh), and got to Keylong by nightfall with only enough energy left to crash at the Tashi Deleg.

Sight of the day: A couple of Himalayan eagles soaring above us while we were waiting for Anu to come. Even in the state that I was in, the eagles brought a smile to me. Pure grace and beauty!

Return to Ladakh - The starcast

I was still reminiscing about Thailand, when it was time to begin preparing for the mother of all trips - the repeat to Ladakh, with the hope that this one would end better. The last one, although highly eventful and remembered fondly, ended with us unable to reach even halfway to our destination! 3 years down, this was our chance to make up for the failure.

The first guy to pack his bags and be ready for the trip was Zappy of course, but turned out he was the one who did not finally make it. The last person we thought would come was Chavan, but he managed to make it here just in time! In between was a mile long mail trail of planning, persuading, begging, and general bull$#!t. When at last we met at Delhi airport, there were 5 of us.


The usual suspects ...
1. The Terminator a.k.a Abby
2. High Command a.k.a Kavi
3. Dhakka Start a.k.a Chavan
4. Macho Man a.k.a Aj (that's me)

... And introducing ...
5. Bullet Baba a.k.a Manoj (I just made that up ... we did not have anything for Manoj on the trip!)

The drive from Delhi to Chandigadh is a super drab affair. Till we got to dinner, the after-a-long-time talk kept us awake. But after a paratha heavy dinner, there wasn't anything anyone could do to keep from falling asleep, especially with Abby going on about how he had not slept in 2 days! Except for Chavan, who was on keep-the-driver-awake detail, the rest of us just dozed off after dinner. Abby and me even managed to redesign the last seat and convert it into a makeshift bedroom for ourselves. I can't say it was the most comfortable bed I've slept in, but it sure was better than sitting up the whole night!

Morning saw us entering Himachal and seeing some rains. The landscape is a lot more interesting here in the mountains, but the lack of rains this year was apparent in the dry lake bed in Bilaspur. I remembered looking down out of the airplane the previous day and seeing the brown all over, very uncharacteristic for this late in the monsoon season!

We soon stopped for breakfast, again Bunty's decision, as were most stops on the whole drive! There were times when he almost made us feel like we were a bunch of hitchhikers he had picked up somewhere along the way! After a crappy breakfast, we started on the final leg of our trip. By the time we got to Manali, we had already finalized our shopping list and bike spares checklist, and had assigned duties to everyone. We had just one half day in Manali to get all the arrangements done, and we were going to have to be quick!

It did seem a tough ask, but somehow we managed to get everything done (in spite of some difficulties with missing driving licenses, total ignorance of Enfield bullets, and extreme negativity from some of the team). The guys at Anu Motors were extremely helpful helping us get all the rides and riders ready for the trip the next day. Abby and Chavan practically learnt to ride in that one afternoon!

By the time we had finished our dinner at Manali (with old monk for good luck), we were actually raring to set out. Wake up time 0430 hours and ETD 0500 hrs.