Ted Conover

by The Routes of Man: How Roads Are Changing the World;the Way We Live Today

  The walkers were mostly teenagers. They had maxed out the educational opportunities in Reru, their medieval hamlet, and were taking advantage of the cold to get out of Dodge—to make their way to boarding schools in Srinagar, the summer capital of Jammu and Kashmir, and in Leh, the capital of Ladakh, not far from the end of the chaddar along the Indus River. They also were taking advantage of scholarships, offered by Europeans sympathetic to young Tibetan Buddhists in this poor, traditional part of the world.

  In the coldest part of winter, Ladakhi teenagers bound for boarding school leave their remote valley via the frozen river trail known as the chaddar.

  To claim their new lives, the teenagers of Reru had to do just two hard things. They had to leave their ancestral home. And they had to go by way of a frozen river. But they would not have to go alone. A number of male relatives would accompany the group—as well as a handful of students from even smaller, outlying villages. Last, there would be me and my guide, Seb Mankelow (an Englishman who was first drawn to Zanskar as a climber, then studied its agriculture as a graduate student, and now welcomed any chance to go back), and my interpreter, Dorjey Gyalpo (a clerk for the local government who was both a deeply religious Buddhist and a worldly Renaissance man, fluent in Harry Potter and eager to discuss the recent eclipse of the sun)—plus our cook and four porters. So, in all, about forty people walking the chaddar’s ice. As fast as we could.

  Walking fast shortened the trip, allowing the students to carry few clothes and little food. Raised on steep mountains at high altitude, the Zanskaris were adept at walking fast, even on ice. I was not. The ice could be extraordinarily slippery. Sometimes it wasn’t—sometimes it was dimpled or topped with rough crystals or had dirt frozen in, so your boots could get a purchase. But most times it was the very soul of slipperiness, smooth like a mirror or, even worse, smooth like a mirror hidden under a thin layer of snow.

  And here and there, there are breaches, most often toward the middle, where it is perfectly possible to step into open water. Depending on the light and the sky, the water will be pitch-black or pellucid blue, the surface rippled by crystals of ice, a giant moving Slurpee, swirling around frozen banks and then disappearing under sheets of ice. And even the frozen surface does not stay still. At night, sometimes, you hear the loud reports of the ice cracking. And, during the day, the chaddar can change while you are on it. You take a step and hear a deep whump and feel a loss of elevation of maybe an inch or so and think uh-oh.

  Villages in the Himalayan mountains are among the most remote on earth. That isolation goes hand-in-hand with religiosity: Ladakh, in eastern Kashmir, has long been a center of Tibetan Buddhism. Stunning monasteries perch on hillsides (local families still try to send one son to become a monk, and thus earn merit), and rare is the road or trail that does not feature a chorten—a whitewashed shrine on the corner of which walkers place a pebble, as they walk around clockwise—or a mani pile: a long, thick wall of small flat stones, each engraved in Tibetan script with the mantra especially revered by devotees of the Dalai Lama, om mani padme hum.

  The road connecting Zanskar to Kargil was not completed until 1980. Even during the short summer months when the road is open, travel in a bus or four-wheel-drive vehicle takes at least eight hours, and may take much longer. My first ride out of Zanskar one June was delayed when a dramatic slide of rocks and mud came to a stop across the road just in front of us; passengers in taxis and a bus piled out and began working as a group to clear the road. Later in the day, another slide roared through a ravine we had crossed maybe two minutes before.

  This limited access to the outside world; the traditional, organic architecture of its buildings; its friendly, attractive inhabitants; its traditional social arrangements; and the frequent absence of features of modern life that people in the West take for granted (round-the-clock electricity, phone service, crime, drugs, the stresses of fast-paced living) might evoke the idea of Shangri-La, of an alpine utopia. In the novel Lost Horizon (1933), the basis of the movie that popularized the idea of Shangri-La, James Hilton conjured up a hidden valley run by enlightened and ageless lamas who jealously guard their isolation, knowing that paradise could be ruined by exposure to the outside world—a place that, in the wake of World War I, appeared to the lamas (and to Hilton) to be veering toward self-destruction.

  This idea of alpine paradise, of innocence in a setting of natural beauty, preserved by isolation, has certainly endured in the West—and the American West. High alpine cul-de-sacs like Aspen or Telluride, Colorado, cultivated this mystique, especially in the years before they became jet-setter destinations. Even down in smoggy Denver people loved the idea of Shangri-La. A hundred yards from the semi-suburban house in which I spent my teenage years, in fact, a businessman built a replica of the gleaming white mansion/lamasery from the movie Shangri-La. His property was on a bit of arise and he had a nice view of the Rocky Mountains, but, alas, he was irretrievably on the plains: an iron gate had to substitute for a blizzardy mountain pass when it came to keeping the outside world at bay.

  But Zanskar—Zanskar was the real thing. I wondered: Did people there feel they lived in paradise? Were they wary of the outside world?

  It seemed an especially good place to ask these questions because roads figured into the answers. High above the chaddar, at both ends of the gorge, cuts blasted out of the rock were the beginnings of an all-winter road the government wanted to build in order to make Zanskar accessible to the outside world year-round. Who wanted that road? Who did not? And until it was finished, who dared to walk the chaddar?

  I took two trips to find out, the first in the summer of 2004 and the second the following winter.

  In June, I traveled by bus from Leh, the pretty but touristy capital of Ladakh, to Kargil, and from there by four-wheel-drive truck to Padum. Though Leh and Padum were less than seventy miles apart as the crow flies, the trip took two full days of travel—it was less direct and had more ups and downs than even the road from Cuzco to Puerto Maldonado. The high snows were melting and the rivers were high, but the climate was arid, the slopes mostly brown. Scenery included giant glaciers and vistas across ranges much higher than the Rocky Mountains, a daunting and inhospitable landscape that, though lightly populated, was fervently disputed: Pakistani forces had infiltrated and attacked Kargil in 1999, prompting a mobilization of at least 20,000 Indian troops. In Leh I was less than one hundred miles from Tibet, and even closer to India’s disputed border with China. And from Kargil it was only about three hundred miles to Afghanistan, where NATO forces battled the Taliban insurgency.

  But when I crossed the Pensi La pass and entered Zanskar, it was easy to forget all that. The wide valley was sparsely settled. Near streams the land was irrigated and green with fields of barley, lentils, and potatoes. The summer was short, so everybody seemed to be outside: children clad in robes walked alongside their mothers by the roads or worked in fields; Buddhist monks in maroon robes were commonplace; a golden light of evening warmed the cool breeze. There wasn’t much traffic and there was plenty of space; people seemed happy and friendly.

  Accompanied by Seb and Dorjey, I talked to road crews, government officials, the titular king of Zanskar (now a schoolteacher), teenage ponymen, and many monks; and we trekked to the fabulous cliffside monastery of Phugtal, several stories tall, stopping along the way to visit with Buddhist nuns.

  And then in early 2005, just when it was getting really, really cold in Zanskar, I went back to see the valley’s other face—the frozen side. And that’s how I found myself, on a February day as snow swirled and people huddled in their winter kitchens around stoves fired by dried animal dung, sitting in the tiny village of Reru in the house of its headman, among people preparing to do something scary and risky that on the one hand was going to make some of them very sad—and that was, on the other hand, a glorious expression of hope.

  Lobzang Tashi was a fifty-year-old widower with seven children and many counselors. As headman of Reru, he
had a big decision to make: when the group should head down the chaddar.

  Lobzang took his duties seriously. The chaddar journey with children happened once a year, at most—and this year one of his own daughters would be part of it. By late January, reports from travelers were dribbling in. The ice was pretty good, said many; there was little open water. A little soft yet, said others. He spoke with other parents and with elders in the village of 250 people. He went down to the river himself—Reru is perched on a steep hillside about three hundred feet above the Lungnak River, a tributary of the Zanskar, which is in turn a tributary of the Indus. The Lungnak seemed pretty well frozen, but it was smaller than the Zanskar. Lobzang then did what any reasonable person would do: he consulted a monk.

  The village of Reru, a medieval warren of mud-brick houses in the Zanskar valley

  The monk, thin, thirtyish, and wearing the traditional maroon goncha, a woolen robe tied at the waist, arrived from a village several hours’ walk upstream. He sat cross-legged with a number of the men on a rug atop an earthen floor, drinking salt tea. After a while, the monk took out his packet of hand-painted prayer texts and began chanting quietly. The others continued to converse. Then he finished and arose; deciding upon a date would take him a day or two, he said, and in the meantime he’d return to the monastery. A messenger would return with the news.

  While we waited, I got to know the village.

  Five girls were going, and four boys, all from different families. In the entire village, perched on a mountainside, there were only twenty-five houses, so the journey was a major event for the community. A number of fathers, uncles, and brothers would accompany the group, as well as a handful of boys who wanted to take a look at Leh.

  The village was an intriguing medieval warren of mud-brick houses three and four stories high, some whitewashed, uneven and irregular. Roofs were flat and often piled high with hay and the dried animal dung that fueled stoves; tattered strings of prayer flags fluttered over many. The ground level was devoted to animals: sheltered spaces where goats and oxen and dzos (a yak-cow mix) could spend the winter. Every day they were walked to water. Not all the houses were stand-alone; many adjoined others, sharing walls (and probably some heat). There was no electricity except for a few small solar-powered, fluorescent fixtures distributed by the government. Rooms on the corner of a house could be quite chilly; Seb and I shared one in Lobzang’s house, and always had our parkas on. Lobzang would light a fire in its stove every morning to help us out of bed; the warmth lasted about an hour before dissipating through the barely caulked windows. When we finally left the room, several days after arriving, we noticed that the snow that had fallen off our backpacks in a corner had never melted.

  We walked around the village to meet students in the days before departure. Stanzin Zoma, sixteen, was in the kitchen with her mom and dad, two younger sisters, and a grandmother. After she served tea, I asked her about the trip. It would be her first time on the chaddar, she said, and her first time to Leh. “I am packing wool socks, wool clothes, a sleeping bag and pad, gloves, butter, cheese, tsampa [roasted barley flour, a local staple, that a traveler could mix with tea], baked bread, sugar, and tea. Also, pictures of my family, my house, my aunt and uncle, my village, and my school.” She would also bring a single pair of silver earrings, her only jewelry. Though a fire was burning in the small stove on the floor, it was cold inside the low-ceilinged kitchen. We sat cross-legged on rugs. Almost everyone in the room wore a hat, except for Stanzin. “I am worried about leaving my parents here and being alone. And about the chaddar: they say that sometimes you have to take off your shoes and walk through the water—I think that is scary. But I have my best friend, Sonam Dolma, and she will walk with me. I would like to become a doctor, because there are no doctors here.” Stanzin seemed mature and responsible and probably the least worried person in the room.

  Her friend, Sonam Dolma, lived in a house with a brighter, sunnier main room that had pillows on the floor. She wanted to be a doctor, too—people had only traditional medicine to treat their coughs, earaches, bad backs, and dental problems, she explained. She seemed nervous but not upset. In fact, she said, she’d been at a party the night before with other girls her age, at which lots of special food was served. Some of her formality melted away as she described in detail the dishes they’d eaten—the momos, or meat dumplings; the egg curry; the special tsampa. Like Stenzin she said she would miss her family, but she explained that leaving would be easier because her father and brother would walk on the chaddar with her. Sonam seemed bright-eyed and on the tips of her toes, and I got the feeling that both she and her friend were excited about the prospect of busting out of their little village, at least for a while.

  That was clearly not the case, however, with Tunzin Thongdol, at fourteen the second youngest of Lobzang’s seven children, and the first one to have the opportunity to leave. She didn’t want to go at all. Apparently she viewed me and Seb as harbingers of departure, and tried very hard not to talk to us—we’d been living in the house for at least three days before we even knew she was there. But Lobzang coaxed/compelled her out of her room and into the winter kitchen. “I don’t feel good about leaving,” she said. “I’ve never left home before, and I don’t want to leave my family.” I had some more questions, but Tunzin couldn’t bear them; she fled back into her room.

  Also upset was the mother of Thinlay Angmo, seventeen—she broke down in tears as Thinlay listed for me the things she’d miss about home: “family, mountains, school, the land—I will miss them all.” Like all the other girls, Thinlay made tea and served it to us herself. Her hands, when she passed me the steaming hot teacup, were callused and able to withstand a lot of heat: all of the girls spent hours a day around the hearth. However, said the petite young woman, “I’m not going to miss some of my chores.” (Teenage girls were depended on heavily by most families to do all manner of jobs, from cooking to caring for animals and younger siblings. Two people told me, in fact, that Thinlay’s mother was possibly most upset about all the additional work she would now have to do.)

  The three boys professed not to be worried at all. Two had been to Leh already, one via the chaddar; Tenzin Namdol, fifteen, said it was “no problem. I’m a fast walker.” Another, handsome Lobzang Teshi, came from a family that was noticeably poorer than the others. Their kitchen was dark and dusty; his mother and siblings wore tattered clothes. His father, he explained, had died a few years before. His mother prayed that he’d eventually be able to support the family from afar.

  All three of the boys wanted to become engineers; an engineer, to each of them, was a man who supervised road construction (and got paid well for it). “Roads are very important to our lives,” explained Tenzin Namdol.

  Exhibit A was the dirt road that ran by the village’s edge. Reru had been linked by the road to Padum, about twelve miles downriver, just a few years before. Government crews were now using the warm months to extend the road to Reru further up its valley. Their progress was slow because at many points the valley wall was pure rock.

  But the road by Reru was part of a much bigger effort to connect Zanskar to the rest of India. India’s objectives, like the goals behind many roads, were multiple, and they were interrelated: economic development, national integration, and national security—particularly the last. Because, though exceedingly remote, Zanskar was not far from geopolitics. During the brief Kargil War of 1999, Pakistani troops took up positions inside India; their artillery shells killed several farmers near Kargil before the troops withdrew. But what raised the stakes of territorial disputes over this and other parts of Kashmir were weapons of a different order of magnitude. The border skirmishes—some of which erupted on freezing glaciers, far from any settlement—mattered because India and Pakistan were both nuclear states, presumably with warheads aimed at each other.

  A history of fractious relations with China, the other northern neighbor, complicated matters further. In 1950 the Chinese invaded Tibet, resu
lting in the exodus to India of thousands of refugees including, in 1959, the Dalai Lama. Monks from Zanskar and other parts of Ladakh were cut off from Tibetan monasteries to which they had been connected for centuries. In 1962 the Chinese pushed farther, occupying parts of eastern Ladakh as well as another region of northern Kashmir. One map I bought in China, published in Singapore in 2005, showed all of Kashmir within China’s national boundaries, though a dotted line around it said “subject to dispute.” Sensitivity over the issue led to the closure to outsiders of many beautiful valleys north and east of Leh, and the border with China, as of my visits, remained off-limits. At the same time, relations between China and India, the two developing giants, seemed to be warming; commercial ties between them were growing. The more ongoing problem was Pakistan.

  In fact, several people I met in Ladakh observed that nothing would be likely to accelerate construction of the chaddar road more than tension with Pakistan. The reason was military and economic. Both sides of the India-Pakistan border were heavily militarized; India’s had thousands of soldiers, many of them in Leh. Feeding them was expensive, because for much of the year, winter snow prevented highway access from the south. Food had to be flown in. An all-season road through Zanskar, linking Leh and the border region to Manali, in Himachal Pradesh state, and to other points south, would ultimately save the military a great deal of money.

  It would also help consolidate India as a nation. Many Zanskaris barely felt part of India at all; people departing on a trip to the south would say, “I’m going to India for a while,” as though they were not already in it. And indeed, the mainly Buddhist Zanskaris felt a greater kinship to the Tibetan Buddhists across the border in China than they did to local speakers of Hindi. The Indians considered the Zanskaris a “scheduled tribe,” meaning a group with its own ethnic background that was poorly integrated into the nation and required special attention, such as federal grants for things like medical care and education. The classification was designed in part to quash any separatist sentiment and to encourage the building of a unified nation.