Ted Conover

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

  As we woke in Padum before dawn that morning after the trek down from Reru, preparing for the first real day of our chaddar trek, I thought how reassuring it would be to have the Indian Army behind you on an expedition into the wilderness. (Seb said the float trip had gone well.) But, in the absence of the army, I was glad to have Seb, who had done this before.

  Seb’s experience and his web of local contacts made him a valuable companion. I usually preferred to travel alone because it nudged me toward more interaction with local people. But Seb made meeting local people easier. And in a situation that was possibly risky—such as the visit to the logging camp in Peru—having dependable company seemed like a good idea. Seb had advised me on gear: I wouldn’t want a tent, for example, because of the huge amount of condensation that formed inside one in this climate. And instead of sleeping on an air mattress, which could be easily punctured by the rocky ground, he suggested I carry a really thick pad for use under my sleeping bag, and named the Canadian company that was the best supplier.

  Seb had introduced me to Dorjey, whose services as translator and fixer were indispensable, but I had balked at his suggestion that I also hire a cook and porters. I had never liked the old model of Himalayan mountaineering, the picture of a couple of white guys leading the climb while a score of brown-skinned men shouldered their voluminous kit; a real man should be able to shoulder his own stuff. Okay, said Seb, but how do you intend to keep up with the teenagers, who carry practically nothing—and are already better at walking on the ice than you or me? Food weighs a lot, unless, like them, you’re able to survive on snacks for several days. How will you collect wood in the evening, when you’re exhausted, in order to have a fire?

  He also helped me appreciate that porter work, rare as it is, was one of the only jobs available to Zanskari men during the long winter months, and that being a trekker who employed porters gave you a status they understood: it explained your presence in their villages, or as a guest in their kitchens. “Also, if you get hurt, it’s not such a bad thing to have people along to help carry you out.” And so I conceded the point.

  From Padum to the head of the chaddar was about twenty-five miles. The Reru gang would travel in the available school bus. A highway truck had originally been sought for transporting me and my crew. I had taken a winter ride in the back of this truck before, and had possibly never been colder in my life; even the Zanskaris who’d been with me appeared nearly frozen. So I was relieved to hear that, at the last minute, another, smaller school bus had been lined up for us.

  We gathered on the dark and icy street at about four a.m. There was no moon, though the huge sky over the valley was filled with thousands of stars. I’d met my crew before and greeted them anew: there was Punchok Chosphel, the cook, in his mid-twenties, who had a wide, winning smile and good fashion sense (he had hand-sewn his leather boots, wore a variety of hats and scarves, and eschewed traditional Zanskari winter wear for a parka); Tsewang Rinchen, forty-two, a workhorse of incredible muscle and endurance; Tsering Dorjey, a thirty-something plasterer inexperienced in the chaddar who had gotten the job through connections; and Lobzang Tashi, fifty, the Reru headman who had been my host in the village. Lobzang Tsetan lived in the village of Zangla; we would pick him up on the way. Though he had only one eye, this Lobzang was probably the best ice-walker of the group, and like Tsewang he was steady and indefatigable.

  My relief at having a bus was premature. The only advantage the bus had over the highway truck, I soon discovered, was that it was mostly enclosed. But not all the windows would shut and surprisingly, like a majority of the vehicles in service in Zanskar—indeed, in greater Ladakh—it had no heater. This became a significant problem about forty-five minutes into our journey, when we stopped on the road opposite the village of Zangla to pick up Lobzang Tsetan. It was sometime before five a.m., and no amount of blasting on the bus’s horn appeared sufficient to rouse him, though I imagine it woke up everyone else in the village. Finally it became too cold to simply sit in the bus; we got out and walked on the dark, icy road. The sky, with the earliest hints of dawn, was deeply, hauntingly blue, and thank God Seb took a picture because I couldn’t appreciate it: I’d put on every stitch of warm clothing I’d brought (down parka with hood, insulated pants) and yet my feet, even inside my insulated boots, were on the verge of freezing. Seb and I jogged up and down the deserted road to keep warm while somebody went to drag the porter out of bed. It took a long time.

  Our flock of students, meanwhile, was somewhere behind us on the road, delayed with a flat tire. They huddled three to a seat inside their bus, they told me later, and made the best of it. They were more accustomed to the cold than I; but still, it made me understand just how vulnerable one is when traveling in the Himalayan winter, outside the umbrella of officialdom.

  About half an hour further along, the wide-open valley closed in, and within a couple of miles the road was no longer on the valley floor but on a hillside. The ribbon of ice-topped river ran below us now, down snowy, rocky slopes at the bottom of the deepening gorge. As we neared the peaks that ringed the valley, their summits disappeared from view (so big were they, and so close were we) even as other details became visible in the rising light of day.

  I recognized the end of the road from my summer visit. It ended where there was no more soft hillside to bulldoze, only rock. On that trip, I spent time with the construction team, a group of seven or eight men who had just set a number of explosive charges into holes they’d drilled in the rock. They showed them to me about three minutes before they lit the fuses, and advised that I retreat a safe distance. Soon they came running toward me. A thunderous blast followed a few seconds later, which I could see before I heard or felt anything; we were in no danger from the rock that sprayed out, but it shook the mountains so forcefully that rocks from the hillside above our observation point came down in a light but alarming rain. Nobody was hurt. When things had settled, a bulldozer cleared debris from the blasting area—shoved it into the gorge, essentially. The road cut had just been extended another few feet.

  As we pulled our packs and sleds from the bus, I could see that since our visit the previous June the blasting had progressed only another fifty yards or so. The chaddar gorge was so long, and so intimidating, that odds were it would remain intact for many years to come.

  There was no waiting around. The porters knew that the Reru group was traveling lighter than we were, and would catch up. And that, more crucially, movement and speed were how you kept warm outside in the wintertime. We broke a trail sideways down the mountain toward the river, Seb and I carrying our own gear in backpacks, four porters carrying cooking equipment and food for the group. Each porter had on his back one of the handmade sleds that doubled as a rucksack frame, like the one I’d seen Lobzang make. Dorjey wore white, rubberized, insulated Indian Army boots, as did one porter; the other porters wore thin leather boots except for one-eyed Lobzang Tsetan, who wore cheap leather oxfords (we could see his white socks).

  There is a moment of magic when your boots first touch the ice: you know you’re on a special road that will extend, deities willing, uninterrupted for the next forty miles, taking you out into the larger world. It was like a train track that way—something solid that allowed for more speedy, efficient travel than caroming over the adjoining rock and dirt. Indeed, there were many points ahead where, were there no ice, there would be no human passage at all (though mountaineers might get through with concerted effort).

  And yet from the first step you also appreciated that ice had unique perils. My first steps, small and tentative, reflected my twin fears of slipping or falling through, especially given the weight of my pack. My feet were cold enough already without being soaked! But here the ice looked firm, and the need to keep up with the porters overcame my caution.

  One reason I wanted to keep up with them—in addition to the fear of being left behind—was to learn how they navigated the chaddar. Of the five, three had sticks, and tapped the ice j
ust in front of them constantly as they moved. It made different sounds when they did, usually firmly resonant, but sometimes hollow-sounding, at which time the forward motion of our line slowed. The surface it presented changed, as well, from perfectly smooth to the texture of coarse sandpaper, with tiny crystals or windblown dirt on top, to truly rough ice that had cracked and healed. The surface was not perfectly flat, as a frozen lake might be; underneath was a huge, moving river whose flow waxed and waned, pushing the ice up or allowing it to slowly cave in. You might not notice that the pitch had changed, and that could lead to a fall.

  Another thing that changed was opacity. The ice could be translucent, like cubes of architectural glass, sometimes laced with cracks and fissures; other times it was milky. But occasionally it was startlingly clear, and you could look several feet down to the pebbles at the bottom, almost as if you were walking on water.

  The chaddar started shallow; the canyon walls were not steep here, nor were they pure rock. Trees and shrubs grew out of snow-covered gravel. Above was the short gash that the dozen-man road crew had managed to blast away in several weeks of summer work. In the sun that hit the rim of the canyon we spotted a roosting lammergeier, a huge vulture. But the view quickly changed as we walked, in the chaddar’s shadow, lower and lower into the channel that had been eroded into rock over centuries, back into geological time. The rock walls moved closer and closer to the river until there was no soil left, no plants within reach. The wind seemed to abate as they did, and the sense of entering a special, private world increased.

  I shuffled behind the porters, tracing a meandering path down the frozen riverbed, following them toward whichever way looked firmest. An hour or two into our trek, the teenagers, delayed by the flat tire, caught up with us, and the two groups merged into one long single file. The sun rose but the gorge deepened, keeping us from its rays. When we reached a junction—another river, the Oma Chu (Milk Water), flowed in from a side canyon to merge with the Zanskar—Lobzang Tashi, the headman, declared a meal stop. I wasn’t sure I was glad, since a chilly breeze rushed in from the side canyon and I still wasn’t quite recovered from the predawn freeze. But then someone pointed out a cave maybe fifty feet above the ice, and not too hard to reach via a series of natural and manmade steps. There was a series of caves, I knew, up and down the chaddar. Most weren’t very deep, but they had sheltered travelers from wind and precipitation for generations; most even had names. This one was known as Tsarag Do. The walls, darkened by soot from countless campfires, attested to this history. Men gathered driftwood and brush from the surrounding area and carried it up to the cave, and in twenty minutes fires were burning and tea water boiling.

  The frozen river briefly lets walkers deep into a zone they could never otherwise visit: the Zanskar River gorge.

  Seeing the older men and young people mix was intriguing, because of the stark difference in their clothing. These kids had never been to a mall, but they were already absorbing Western culture. The grown men all wore the goncha, a knee-length Ladakhi robe made of heavy wool dyed maroon and tied around the waist with a sash. The teenage boys, by contrast, wore a variety of fleece and nylon jackets of many colors. Little boys were still dressed by their mothers in gonchas, and nothing was cuter. But on the rare occasion when I saw a teenage boy in Zanskar wearing a goncha, I immediately thought he either was from a really isolated village or was a bit of a hick.

  The old and the new seemed to meld more easily with the girls. Over their pajama-like salwar kameez most had jackets or fleece. I caught up with Stanzin Zoma and Sonam Dolma in the cave, nibbling on cold tsampa with some pickled cabbage and carrot while they waited on the tea. I was surprised to see that both were wearing only pink sneakers with wool socks. In the bus en route, said Stanzin Zoma, her heels had gotten really cold.

  “Aren’t you worried about snow getting in there?” I asked.

  “If you just step in the tracks in front of you, sometimes you can keep away from snow,” explained Stanzin. “What I’m really worried about is falling in water. We heard there is some open water further down.”

  “Won’t your families buy you boots?”

  They looked a little embarrassed. “It’s just that we don’t go out walking so often in deep snow,” said Stanzin.

  Most people had left their packs down on the ice; the view out from the cave was almost monochromatic except for the synthetic fabrics: the bright yellows, reds, and greens of knapsacks and jackets. Thirty years ago, I was pretty sure, you would never have seen such colors in here. In fact, thirty years earlier, much about the chaddar was different.

  The earliest account of chaddar travel I could find comes from James Crowden, an English explorer and poet who, at age twenty-two, spent the winter of 1976-77 in Zanskar. He claims to have been the first Westerner to walk the chaddar. “After three days waiting around for the auspicious moment we finally left at three in the afternoon,” he wrote. His companions were carrying tubs of yak butter to trade in Leh for cooking pots, soap, and fresh vegetables, among other things. Their shoes were handmade and of a kind hard to find in Zanskar anymore: leather and pointy-toed, with woolen uppers that extended up to a tie below the knee. Nobody wore socks; instead, the shoes were stuffed with straw for warmth. Everyone in his group wore a goncha.

  Caves along the chaddar were as important when Crowden traveled as they are today, particularly for sleeping, as they help keep one out of wind and moisture. In many caves, walls of stone helped to partition the protected space into even smaller spaces. Just as they did not carry water bottles, though, the Zanskaris did not carry sleeping bags or tents. Instead, as we saw when it darkened that first night and the group stopped at another cave, they laid out a plastic groundcloth and stayed warm by lying together, and by using the gonchas and other clothing that had warmed them individually to warm them as a group. (When he was there, wrote Crowden, the most popular Zanskari sleeping style was kneeling, preserving heat by putting the arms around the legs.)

  Seb and I, by contrast, carried big Arctic-class sleeping bags with several inches of lofted down, and laid these upon the thick foam pads to insulate us from the cold of the ground. We wore knit hats and each of us kept a specially marked pee bottle inside the bag with us, so that if the need arose we would not need to climb out into the frigid night air. I was torn between a sense of deep fondness and gratitude for my massive sleeping bag, and a nagging concern that our equipment-intensive solution was inferior to the Zanskaris’ community-intensive one, and set us apart as rich. Still, I knew that it was too late for me: as a younger man, I had slept spooned with Mexicans crossing the Sonoran Desert into Arizona in January and knew that, while it had kept me fairly warm, sleep had been practically impossible. You had to grow up doing that for it to work.

  The worst part of the day, of course, was dawn, and the first minutes out of the sleeping bag. I waited until the porters had brewed a pot of tea and then joined the knot of people seated around the fire. A mini-thermometer on Seb’s pack said it was ‒12 degrees Celsius (10 degrees Fahrenheit). Lobzang Tashi withdrew from his bag a pile of block-printed pages of prayers, wrapped in cloth, and commenced quietly to chant; I noticed he did this whenever there was a chance, usually several times a day. One of the porters reached for his cap, meanwhile, and produced a needle that he stored there. He tapped gently into the surface of a block of ice he had carried up from the river and, like magic, it fractured the cube neatly into smaller pieces that would fit into a pot for melting.

  It was going to be a long day, and nobody was getting any warmer by waiting around. Snow had fallen overnight, and we set new tracks alongside others that had been made while we slept: rodent prints now crisscrossed the river, along with the tracks—Dorjey claimed—of a snow leopard. “Are you sure?” I asked. They were so big and catlike they could be nothing else, but books like Peter Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard, about Tibetan Buddhism and a trek with a biologist in search of the endangered animals, had led me to believe ther
e were practically none left.

  “Oh, yes,” Dorjey replied, and we stepped out of the single file a few moments later so that he could show me more evidence. He found it on the sides of two rocks at river’s edge, where the leopard had slowed and walked in a circle. “Look,” he said, urging me to get close. On the rough surface of the rocks were two or three hairs; he pinched them between his fingers and held them up for me to examine; they were three to five inches long. “It is his whiskers,” explained Dorjey. “Here he scratched his face.”

  The passage of such a large predator just yards from where we’d slept didn’t put me any more at ease on the chaddar, but Dorjey laughed and said the snow leopard wasn’t interested in us. In their scat one found mostly the bones of small animals, he said—marmots, pikas, and wildfowl. In rare cases they might eat one of the larger animals that lived in these parts and which we could see as we walked, sometimes high up on the canyon walls: ibex, blue sheep, possibly argali. Leopards willingly came near humans only in coldest winter, and then only in hopes of finding a captive farm animal such as a dzo. He reminded me of a house we had stopped at the previous summer, in the valley above Reru as we trekked to Phugtal monastery. After dinner, the family gave Dorjey something to show me: a large piece of stiff snow leopard pelt. I was amazed to find myself suddenly holding such a mythic relic in my hands.