Friday, August 07, 2009

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.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Wow!Thanks for putting in more snaps.The landscape is truely beautifully..
Wellwisher

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