The Road to Leh

We come gently down an open valley to the foot of the dreaded twenty-one Gata Loops. I am ready to get in the jeep, perhaps all the way to Leh. However, Ann says “Let's see what we can do,” and gives Apollo's last bit of load to Rakesh. We labour upwards, our 24 teeth of front sprocket pulling the chain slowly over 34 rear teeth, wondering whether there are twenty-one hairpins or is it twenty-one bits of road between? and looking back down at the valley we left - half an hour, an hour, an hour and a half ago - and debating, is this loop number seventeen or is it eighteen? Rakesh waits for us to give up.

But the Diamox takes effect. We climb all twenty-two loops (did we count one twice?); then the road takes us around the side of the mountain, and in another ten kilometres we will be - and then we are - on Nakila La. Across desolate Whisky Nullah is Lachlung La, and it begins to seem that if we keep nibbling at this mountain road in bottom gear perhaps we will get there. Even with an unwanted stop to sleeve Apollo's front tyre at Whisky Nullah.

Gasping and elated, at Lachlung La we take, as one does, another prayer flag photo. Then in the failing light our weary bicycle descends down through red twisting gorges and darkening ravines with icicled rocks towards Pang. English cyclists coming the other way under full escort, encamped for the night, give us hot chocolate. They've flown to Leh, rafted on the Indus and cycled up the Kardang La (the highest motorable road in the world) and today they have come over Taglang La, all for a sum beyond our dreams.

The dhabas at Pang (4630m) are tents made of old parachutes, with facilities euphemistically termed “open,” meaning that only darkness can hide a squatting Himalayan cyclist. But the lemon tea and vegetable chow mein (we've abandoned any pretence at liking Indian food) are good, and we sleep.

In the morning the sun again rises cloudlessly, lighting spires of orange rock above. The trucks warm their thunderous engines and blow quivering smoke-rings of exhaust into the still air. The drivers come down to the dhabas to breakfast on plastic chairs at plastic tables, or cook on kerosene burners in their cabs.

The road ascends to a terrace edge, the eroded rim of an empty, waterless valley called the Moray (or Morey, or More?) Plain. Forty blessedly level kilometres between low hills (can hills beside a 4700 metre valley be low?) lead past the cracked mud of a snow-melt lake. Goats nibble non-existent vegetation, and their dark-faced herders hold out plastic jerry-cans, begging water from passing trucks and buses. They call “Very good! Very good!” to one another as they take rides on the back of Apollo. Goat-herd tents dot the valley; but soon all will be gone, for snow closes this road for eight months. The desert plants have set their seed.

For us, this is a land to travel through, not to inhabit. But to these people it's a place to come yearly for their summer. It's a place to make, from a nibble here and a nibble there of dry, deep-rooted plants, enough for a tent, a solar panel, a CD player, and warm clothes for winter, when they stay inside and look forward to spring.

We camp in a ruined stone village near the foot of the last pass, Tanglang La. While Ann cooks, Rakesh blackens his hands helping a family with a collapsed hub bearing. Next day we pass their jeep, abandoned on the road to the pass.

The nineteen kilometres to the pass take four and a quarter creeping hours. Ann counts 49 goat-herders' tents in the valley, white squares which, with excruciating slowness, diminish and fall behind.

On Tanglang La, where rows of empty tar barrels line the road, we are glad we took no notice of the hotel man in Jispa. Rakesh asks for his photograph beside the jeep, because this is the crossing of the Himalaya. Then we make a last, long, red-brown descent, pausing only for Ann to bandage the hurt leg of a Bihari road worker earning as much in a day as we would spend on breakfast.

In the valley we come abruptly to a running stream. Terraced fields appear, and little humpy haystacks, houses with hay and firewood on the roofs and windows painted black and brown, a ruined gompa on the mountain-side, horses, goats, crumbling white chortens (or stupas, perhaps?), women threshing grain, hay-laden ponies, and, best of all, a man in a hat with curled-up ears. This is the village of Rumptse.

Without warning we have left the desert mountains. It is as if this abrupt passage from wilderness to human habitation, from emptiness to abundance, has taken us from death to life; from the high, dry world we have become used to, to another which also is not ours, but is Ladakh. We are utterly unprepared for it, but that only increases our delight. The paradise is spoilt only by the ever-present Himalayan small-boy cry: "One pen?" and by the need to fix our tyre again and hurry on.

The sudden appearance of life shows what water can do with a desert, even in the mountains. But more than anything else, it is the man's black hat with its curly sides, stirring a memory of some traveller's photograph, which tells us we have discovered Ladakh. It seems utterly magical. Do the “One-pen” boys of Rumptse know themselves to be a product of water plus desert?

The road, with the little river and its ribbon of green, follows a gorge. A jeep stops. “Welcome! And do you like Ladakh?” “Very much!” we say truthfully, “but we cannot wait, we must reach Upshi and it is twenty kilometres.” “You will have no trouble, it is all downhill” - which it is, on a smooth road through the mountain valley with rocks the colour of red wine intersecting the sky far above in pinnacles still catching the brilliant light. In the twilight our little river joins a larger one. We have reached the Indus. The woman in the guest house at Upshi (3500m) puts a candle on the stairs to our room, and we have our first wash for five days.