I do wish I had been a bit more in my senses to really enjoy the tent. I had suffered so much to get to it, yet I hardly remember anything except staring into the white canopy and wondering why it was so warm.
“So, do you have any predictions for tomorrow morning?” River enquired while sealing the tent for the night.
“Yes, I do. I think it’s going to be slightly orange and it will smell of bananas.”
“Oooohh, bananas, excellent!”
Anthills
Despite the odds, the road from Manali to Leh is immensely popular with motorcyclists. Like modern day cowboys, men on Harley Davidsons roar into the wilderness with their tents, tool kits and fuel strapped to the carrier. Sometimes you see them struggling to push through a particularly muddy stretch of road; sometimes you see them parked by a cliff staring into the mountains with wide, exasperated eyes. It’s astounding that so many people are willing to go through hell to experience this journey, which includes crossing over three of the world’s highest passes. But I guess, this is the biggest testament to the splendour of Ladakh and its desolate, barren innards. In the right light, the stoic existence of the mountains is incredibly humbling.
However, the extraordinary altitude of Ladakh also gives an excuse to every other road/guesthouse/café/tea stall on the road to call itself the ‘highest’ or the ‘second-highest’ in the world. It doesn’t take long to realize that this is just another gimmick to beguile the tourists. Still, at 4,000 meters above sea level, Ladakh could very well be the closest to heaven most of us would ever be. So it wasn’t entirely unreasonable of us to insist on getting off at Taglang La, the second-highest pass in the world and do something memorable.
These two middle-aged Indian men chose to celebrate the crossing by taking off their shirts and running around half-naked in the freezing cold. The French couple smoked a cigarette despite having hardly enough oxygen to breathe. Two Croatian girls on board broke into a hymn complete with harmonies. They sounded so good that we asked for an encore back in the bus. River declared that he was going to take a piss at this momentous spot. And I? Well, all the exciting options had already been taken, so I decided to munch on a cracker to mark the day. It seems a bit silly now, but at the time, we were all mighty smug about our little accomplishments.
After spending 58 hours on the road, as we were passing through Choglamsar – a small town five kilometres away from Leh – the exhaustion of the journey finally began to creep up on us. The whole bus was subdued, our faces looked ashen and our eyes were bloodshot. The Croatian girls were our angels in this darkest hour before dawn and they tried their best to keep up our spirits with their soothing voices.
I wanted to thank them in person, but the mad scramble that followed our arrival in Leh robbed me of the opportunity. The usual gang of hustlers ranging from taxi drivers to hotel pimps were in our faces as soon as we had collected our luggage. Like Pokhara, their offers went from unaffordable to farcical within minutes. Having learnt from past mistakes, we outright declared that we were poor, shoestring backpackers with a meagre budget of 300 a night. But a few of them were still willing to give us a room. It was nearly 11 at night and neither of us had the energy to walk around Leh with a map in hand, so we decided to go with the guy who claimed to have apricot and cherry trees in his backyard.
We got into his taxi and slowly ploughed through the roads of Leh. The man had promised that his hotel was just five minutes away from the town centre, but when it took us almost half an hour to get there, I got a bit worried.
“Hey, this doesn’t look like it’s right next to the centre; are you lying to us?”
“No, madam. I’ll show you the short cut tomorrow. Everything is right here, don’t worry.”
“Okay, you better draw me a map then.”
“Oh haha, of course. I will roll the joint for you myself.”
I went blank for a few seconds. How did we get from talking about maps to joints? Was ‘map’ some sort of a code word for drugs in Leh? I wanted to clarify what he meant, but I thought it better to be discreet given the heavy military presence in Leh. However, later at night, this man invited us for a drink with the entire hotel staff in the kitchen. About ten other people were crammed into the small space; someone was playing the guitar and we were offered rum, ganja and free food. They were all Nepalis and we spent the next few hours exchanging a number of gruesome bus travel stories. After staying at this hotel and meeting the flute maestro from Kathmandu, I’ve adopted a whole new approach to picking hotels. Nowadays, I ask the managers if they have any musical talents instead of checking if the flush works. This way I’m guaranteed to have a good time at any price.
The party must have continued into the wee hours of the morning, but we bailed out at about two, because we couldn’t keep our eyes open anymore. The sleep that followed all that singing was so peaceful that I felt completely refreshed and was up by eight. That’s right, eight! I had to check the time thrice to make sure that I wasn’t hallucinating. Marijuana is an excellent muscle relaxant; so I felt no soreness in my limbs, no headache, no nausea. Besides, we had already set apart the next two days for acclimatization and general laziness, so there was no reason to worry.
When we went out to the main market later, looking for food, we ran into some other people from the bus who were planning a trip to Hemis monastery to see the colourful Cham dance. This dance is performed at most Buddhist festivals; in July, it is done to celebrate the birth anniversary of Guru Padmasambhava. At Hemis, the festivities go on for the whole day as monks dressed in free-flowing robes and painted masks dance to the beat of the drums and cymbals.
“Sounds great, can we come along?”
“Sure, the monastery is only 45 kilometres from Leh; we can get there in less than two hours.”
This information immediately killed our enthusiasm and we walked away from the group.
“What should we do? It seems a bit ridiculous that we came all the way to Leh and then chose not to go to Hemis,” River said to me with absolutely no conviction in his voice. He was sprawled out on the couch of this little coffee shop we were at.
“I know, but… fuck it! Let’s go get a beer.”
So yeah, we skipped Hemis for beer, but I wouldn’t recommend this to anyone else. If you find yourself in Leh in July, please go and see the Cham dance at Hemis; rumour has it that it’s spectacular.
* * *
The thing about drinking in Leh is that you have to do it on the sly. Most restaurants here don’t have a liquor licence, so they are not allowed to sell you alcohol. But if you’re polite enough then the waiters can supply you with beer and bill it as ‘pizza’. Apart from this small glitch, the food in Leh is terrific. It’s possible to get just about everything in the city, starting from the finest fettuccine in pesto sauce to creamy Thai green curry with jasmine rice or a spicy Kashmiri mutton biryani. Not to forget the plethora of German bakeries selling the usual fare of croissants, cheesecakes, cookies and delicious coffee.
One can easily spend weeks in Leh, as well as a small fortune, on shuffling from one cool bistro to another. It’s especially hard to resist the ones that offer rooftop seating with clear views of the Royal Palace perched atop the hill at the edge of the city. The travel guides say that this palace was built in the 16th century by a Ladakhi king and that it was modelled to look like the Potala Palace in Lhasa, but I don’t think that’s true. Instead, I’m certain that some powerful monks got together at the bottom of the ridge one day. They began watering its base, feeding it with leftover thukpa in the evenings and voila! the palace had emerged from the massif. On sunny afternoons, the hard lines of the fortress merge so seamlessly with the hillside that it’s impossible to tell where one ends and the other begins.
At the bottom of this knoll, lies the old part of town, which is centuries away from the hip, cafe-covered lanes that we had come to expect from Leh. As we passed through it on our way up to the palace, I felt as though I was exploring a mammoth anthill
, that too, an ancient, decaying anthill. Coincidentally, River had chosen to wear his wide-brimmed straw hat on this day and was also carrying a notebook in hand. This went very well with my whole tomb raider fantasy. Most of the houses here were in dismal condition; they were barely a notch above animal burrows on a mound. No sewage, no ventilation, diseased stray dogs everywhere. There were also a lot of Muslim families in the area, mostly from Kashmir. But the Kashmiris and the Ladakhis co-exist quite peacefully in Leh. From one corner of the city, you can hear the muezzin’s call for prayer and from the other, the chanting of the monks.
In the evenings we didn’t do much except eat, drink beer, watch movies on makeshift screens in the restaurants or sift through the numerous curio shops looking for a good bargain on pashmina shawls. We had a hard time finding a shop that didn’t have Om Mani Padme Hum playing in the background, on a loop, all through the day. They would be listening to the latest Bollywood numbers but the moment a tourist showed up, they switched to Om Mani Padme Hum and started spinning their prayer wheels like a prop.
By the fourth day, we were more than ready to move on from Leh and visit at least one of the many famous monasteries in Ladakh. Our gompa of choice happened to be Thiksey, which is about 19 kilometres south of Leh. The most annoying thing about Ladakh is the glaring dearth of cheap transportation for tourists. All the places worth seeing in the region are well out of the city boundaries, so you have to take cabs everywhere, which can get a bit expensive after a while. Not that I didn’t enjoy being chauffeured around the dusty mountain valleys; I just wished it was cheaper. Nevertheless, the short journey from Leh to Thiksey at the crack of dawn was interesting in itself because we got to drive past the second royal residence at Stok and the numerous whitewashed chortens of Shey, all of which were snuggled into the earth like eggs on a tray. Thiksey is one of the most photographed gompas of Ladakh and it’s easy to see why. With nothing around the premises for miles except mountains and lush paddy fields, the monastery springs out from the flat land in a fountain of maroon and yellow.
Luckily, just as our cab was dropping us in front of the main prayer hall, the sun came up on the horizon, colouring everything with a hint of orange. We quickly climbed up the flight of stairs leading to the hall, fearing that the puja might have already started, but that wasn’t the case. We had actually arrived too early; and the doors were still locked. A few other enthusiastic tourists like us were waiting in the balcony outside and enjoying the panoramic view of the mountains. Half an hour later, a handful of young monks rushed into the hall to sweep the floor and put out the utensils and other paraphernalia required for the ceremony.
We were about to settle down in a corner of the hall when a loud cry of trumpets had us racing to the balcony again. Two monks had stationed themselves on either side of the staircase with their long brass dungchens resting on the low sill. They took a deep breath and repeated a sequence of elephant calls, which was a signal for all the other monks to come for prayer. And come they did! From the monastery behind the hall, the monks trickled out with other instruments like drums, cymbals, dorjes and formed a small procession on the way. Some of them were wearing bright yellow hats that look like a rooster’s crown. This was such an unexpected and wonderful sight; I don’t know how anyone can say that monastic life is dull and boring. In fact, whatever little I saw of it on this trip had already made me jealous. Waking up to a free jazz performance every day is a luxury that only these poor monks can afford.
The small procession came up the steps gracefully and entered the hall. The music ended with a short and intense outro on the drums, after which it was time for the chanting. The incense was lit, the scriptures were opened and soon the floor was humming with the powerful vibrations of Om. During the puja we were all given cups of salty butter tea and a big bowl of thukpa with bits of yak cheese and flat noodles. Instead of spoons, the monks handed us a few twigs, which had been cleaned and split into half. Despite their crude design, I was amazed at how efficiently they got the job done.
After the puja, something else unexpected happened. The monks resumed their places at the door; the trumpets made a cryptic announcement and they all started marching out of the monastery with the scriptures tied to their backs. A few young locals in jeans and sneakers also joined the procession; they were carrying stacks of wood-bound scriptures as well. In order to find an explanation for what was going on, River and I ended up following the parade.
The drummers led the way while the young monks kept running around in circles, laughing and playing their silly games. We crossed the monastery’s boundary, the main road, then we skipped over the watering canals and traipsed right into the paddy fields. We must have trailed the procession for at least an hour as it continued to make its way through the green fields, at which point a girl informed us that they were heading to a monastery in the next village.
“How far away is that?”
“Uh, maybe six hours?”
“And you are going to walk all the way?”
“Yes, we do it every year on this festival day.”
And that was it for the procession. We decided to quit and lingered in the field to watch the yellow rooster hats bobbing away from us against the stark mountains, with the thick maroon tail wriggling behind.
Pangong: The Final Frontier
‘Tso’ in Tibetan means ‘lake’ and Pangong is one of the biggest saltwater lakes in South East Asia. Situated at an altitude of 4,267 metres, it’s about 314 kilometres long and only a quarter of its length lies in India; the rest is a part of Tibet under the Chinese administration. A permit is required to visit this area, which can be easily arranged through any of the travel agencies in town. After Thiksey, Pangong became our next destination and we signed up for an overnight jeep safari with two Belgian tourists, a father and daughter. They had just returned from a long trek across the Markha valley and we were swapping our travel stories within minutes of taking our seats. The father, Christian, was a Flemish writer and an ex-hippie who’d been to India several times since the early 70s.
“But still, I’ve only seen a fraction of this extraordinary country,” he sighed as we crossed the city limits.
The route to Pangong had some of the most amusing road signs I’ve ever seen: Only the best of friends and worst of enemies visit us. If you are married, divorce speed. Better Mr Late than late Mr And my absolute favourite: After whisky, driving is risky.
Our driver Rigzin insisted on going around the chortens in a clockwise direction even while driving, which I found very peculiar.
“You’re very religious,” I remarked casually.
“Am I? I don’t know. This is just the way my parents taught me to live.”
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to offend you. It’s just that we’ve been to so many Buddhist places, but this is the first time I’ve seen someone going clockwise even while driving.”
“Really? Where all have you been?”
“Darjeeling, Sikkim, Nepal, McLeodganj…”
“Nepal? Did you go to Lumbini?”
“Yes, we did actually.”
“How is it? Oh, it is my dream to go there someday.”
“You should! It’s wonderful. Buddhists from all over the world have built their monasteries in Lumbini. On one side you have the Mahayana ones and on the other the Hinyana ones.”
“Ah, okay.”
“So what kind of Buddhist are you?”
“I don’t know, my mother never told me. She used to say that like a tree has the same root but different branches, so does the Buddha.”
“Well, that is true!”
His mother’s words were wise beyond her modest upbringing. And as I was thinking about her, a school bus drove by. When the children saw us, they all waved out of the windows and yelled, ‘Juley!’ which is the Ladakhi way of saying ‘hello’. Since Ladakh barely gets any visitors from November to April, the locals seem very happy to see so many new faces in the summer months. On the highways, workers toiling
away under the sun drop their hatchets when they see a vehicle coming just to greet the travellers with cheerful Juleys. Military convoys, people running tea stalls, gypsies, everyone in Ladakh loves waving at strangers. I guess they can’t help it; there is something very infectious about Juley.
This drive, in many ways, was like a short recap of the one we had done from Manali to Leh. The same lonely naked mountains were present on both sides of the road with white clouds resting on their chest like a woollen muffler. Strong winds had carved thin long crevices on the slopes. This gave them the appearance of flowing water.
Christian was telling us about the rift between the Flemish people in the north and the French-speaking Walloons in the south of Belgium when we noticed a sudden drop in the temperature.
“Alright, get ready, we are beginning the ascent to Chang La, the third-highest motorable pass in the world. It’s 5,360 meters high, right?” he asked Rigzin, who nodded vaguely in return. Christian had a thing for altitudes; he had memorized the heights of all the passes, roads, cities and villages in Ladakh.
It didn’t take us very long to get to the top where we saw yet another ‘highest’ tea stall in the world. It was teeming with tourists sipping on their hot teas and lining up for the toilet. A number of Indian soldiers were also milling about the stall with their rickety barracks nearby.
The Indian army uses Chang La as an acclimatization base before sending off the soldiers to the Siachen glacier, which is obviously the highest battleground on earth. It is said that every year more soldiers, both Indian and Pakistani, die on the glacier because of the inhuman weather conditions rather than in combat. What a waste of life. A lot of soldiers consider Changla Baba, the deity of a nearby temple, to be their guardian angel and they offer all kinds of prayers to him from dawn to dusk. But this only be gets the question that if there really was a mighty Changla Baba in the sky, then why the hell was he sending people to Siachen in the first place?
Special Lassi Page 22
