Ledakh to Himachel Pradesh...
The road to Manali 30-31 June
Ido, Gayla and I left Leh for Manali early in the morning,
5.30am to be exact. I was lucky to have two great people who wanted to do the
same route with me to Manali, Parvati Valley and then Dharamshala. We were to
be picked up by our hired jeep. They were late, and we were grumpy, also when
it eventually arrived with a hazy explanation (the driver probably slept late)
it turned out not to be a jeep at all which seemed slightly less adventurous,
and I thought less of an unstoppable force on the road ahead. But, it seemed
pretty comfortable to me. And a private car to drive us 12-15 hours, such
opulence. If I had more time to spare I would have opted for a bus all the way
to Manali, which would have been around 23 hours or more depending on the state
of the already erratic and gruelling road. As it was, I only had another 16
days in India and I wanted to make my way southwards as quickly as possible.
We
were going to take the car o Keylong which passed the most difficult part of
the road and then a local bus from on to Manali. And it was only £33! £33 to
drive for 12 or more hours in a private, comfortable car. Imagine that. I’d
heard that this road was seriously gruelling and very hard work, especially on
a great big rickety old bus. In the winter months, it was mostly closed due to
snow and landslides of ice and rubble. We set off on the paved roads out of
Leh, leaving the town and heading into the windy village roads. There were
various checkpoints along the way probably because of the tensions in the area
with Kashmir. We stopped just outside Leh and showed our passports to the guard
sitting in an old shabby building and he asked us write down our details like
name, country and purpose of travel. There are many army bases dotted around, one
boasting to be the highest army training ground in the world. We stopped there
for some chai and chapati in a dabba. There was a sign – Manali 425km. 23 hours
to go 425km! And we were only going to Keylong that day, around half way. The
route was through Tanglangla pass, the second highest pass in the world at 5300m.
The highest was around the corner en route to Kashmir, and is 5600m. What an
exciting road to be taking.
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| Check point |
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| Manali 425km, Tanglangla pass 51km. WISH YOU SAFE & HAPPY JOURNEY |
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| Chai shop |
Soon the paved roads gave way to dirt and rubble, the
hundred tone spectrum of greys that are the mountains of Ledakh. The green
oasis’ of villages became less and less and gave way to mountain moonscape as
far as the eye could see. The road became a ledge cut into the mountainside,
with severe drops on one side and a grey stony wall on the other. We were
dozing in and out on the early morning ride but I woke up to brilliant blue
sunshine, snow tipped mountains and a valley below us of such magnitude my
stomach gave a lurch. We were quite literally driving on the roof of the world.
Huge boulders and potholes started appearing in the road, the car dipped and
swerved around them like they were nothing. In the West, people would think
twice about driving SUV’s over some of these rocks and craters, but our Toyota
family car steamed over and around and up and down as if it were nothing. I
couldn’t believe that this was the one road, the only one, southwards from Leh.
It made Ledakh seem so much more isolated and mystical, to know that only
sometimes, you could reach it through this insane road. Small wiry men bundled
up with jackets and scarves over their faces worked and slept on the roadside
in weary, windblown tents. They were repairing the road after the winter
months, painstakingly breaking up all the boulders by hand with a hammer. Some
wives and children peeped out of the remote, roadside tents. What these men earned
living up here in the freezing high altitude amongst the grey rocks I dreaded
to think. They stared sullenly at the car when we went passed but when I smiled
and waved at them each one lit up a smile and waved back. That makes me think
of something Ido told me... keep smiling in India and everything becomes easy.
We got to Taglangla pass and got out to take some pictures
and marvel at the thin pureness of the air and the view of the Indian
Himalayas. It was all greys, whites and blues, and it seemed the only other
colour came from the thick lines of Buddhist prayer flags hanging from the
shrine to mark the start of the pass. I’m guessing these are prayers for
protection. The sign read ‘TAGLANGLA, ALTITUDE 5328mt. YOU ARE PASSING THROUGH
THE SECOND HIGHEST PASS IN THE WORLD, UNBELIEVABLE IS NOT IT?’. And yes, it
was. High altitude is my favourite place to be. The thin air, the feeling of
being kilometres in the sky away from the madness of the world below. My head
feels so much clearer and more alive there. All the oxygen your body is taking
in is to sustain its basic functions. Your brain doesn’t have enough oxygen to
stress and worry about the past or future. It’s like reaching a highly evolved
meditative state; you are wholly in the present moment.
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| Our car at the pass |
After climbing the pass we began to wind down, down into the
valley. A huge, sandy canyon appeared; it looked like there was a small ocean
here like the Dead Sea that had been dried up over the past few million years.
I’ve truly never seen such a huge expanse of land. It felt like dinosaurs were
going to pile into the valley in a stampede, with Pterodactyls swooping in the
air. There was movement in the canyon, a herd of cows being led by horsemen.
There must have been hundreds of them, all in a straight line but they were
tiny, almost to the point of not making them out. It was an unbelievable huge
majestic area of land that we were gazing into, I was unable to really take in
the scale. Our small eyes weren’t big enough. We drove straight into the
valley, a huge sand pit with no road to be seen. Our driver instinctively knew
the way, powering through the sand in a straight line. We were more in the
middle of nowhere than I’d ever been. Tin houses appeared every now again, one
or two on their own, with some scruffy sheep and maybe a dog. How did these
people survive here? No plants, no water, no electricity, no nothing. They had
to drive for a good few hours before getting to the nearest collection of tents
set up for drivers on the route.
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| The desert like valley |
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| Some house tents in the distance |
The road became flat, straight and paved
again, before changing without warning to gravel and rocks. We came to one
small community, a little village of tents with stoves for tea and noodles, and
colourful woollen scarves and gloves for sale. There were hundreds of crows in
the air, circling and landing and squawking. There were guys on big old Royal
Enfield motorbikes, doing and adventure drive along this crazy road. Every so
often there was a lone truck, those really cool, brightly painted, romantic
looking long distance Indian trucks. What they must have seen in their time.
Horsemen would appear, transporting horses and they transporting packs across
the mountain desert. Once, we even saw a lone cyclist. He must have had to
carry his bike over the boulders at points. What kind of thigh muscles do you
need to
cycle this mountain road.
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| Tent village stop off |
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| The crows in the sky |
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| Mr crow |
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| The road beyond |
On and on, up and down, round and round the road went on.
Every corner revealed another vast, majestic landscape. Turquoise water from
rivers down in the valley glistened in the brilliant sunshine. Soon the brown
grey mountain desert became whiter with snow. The roads became wet with the
melt from the mountains, with huge thick slabs of ice lining the roadside. The
colours and textures were incredible, smooth grey shining rock, white snow
drifts, brilliant blue sky, turquoise water, all speckled with light and shade
from the immense valleys and cliffs. There were shepherds and their sheep
filling up the roads, and we weaved in and out.
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| Check the teeny truck climbing up below us |
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| WOOOOW |
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| India's long distance trucks |
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| Ido stepping out to investigate some awesome rock formations |
Soon the greys, whites and
browns of the mountains became greener. We dropped lower in altitude, then
climbed back up again, then dropped back down again. All the time round and
round in the car, on the road cut like a shelf into the mountain. Still greener
it became and the air more moist and thick. When looking out the window, it
felt like you could see an entire mountain from 100m to 4500m, so you had to
look way down and then climb your eyes up and crane your neck to see the top.
So beautiful, I felt tiny like a speck of an ant gazing at a world huger than I’d
ever known it to be.
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| Another truck climbing |
We made it to the town of Keylong in around 12 hours, much
quicker than I thought possible. Our driver drove crazily fast, we all got
carsick more than once and also little tense about the safety, but I was yet to
see a single accident in India. They seem to drive with a third eye and a sixth
sense, and its best to just close your eyes and not think about the thousand
metre drop next to you and the huge trucks squeezing by on the road seemingly
made for one car at a time. Keylong is a tiny town set into the ledges and
slopes of the mountain side. It was green and beautiful that time of year, and
a little warm but not hot. There are amazing views of the mountains surrounding
the town, and I think there are some great treks to do in the area. There are
tiny villages dotted all around the hills, and while the mountains looked
friendly and easy to climb, I’m sure there are some vertical areas which might
get a bit hairy if you decided just to wander off. We found a guesthouse (Rs
550 for three in a room) and explored the little place in twilight for some
food, and found a dabba with some big pots of curries and tasty, sugary sweets.
There weren’t many people around the small town, it was a stopover for people
travelling the mighty road to Leh or perhaps an adventurous trekker. We found
the bus the next morning to Manali, seven hours and costing Rs140 (£1.60). We
hurled our bags on top and secured them to the rails. It was going to be a
bumpy ride.
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| Passing time on the bus |
The road continued on in the same way, although now we were
in a big hulking bus, rubbing thighs with the locals. I had a gruff Indian man
next to me, taking up half my chair while he slept. The road looked only big
enough for one car yet our big old bus would pass big old trucks, with the
wheels two inches from the side of the cliff drop below and into the river that
had carved out this huge valley. Boulders, potholes, gravel, even flowing
rivers weren’t any match for our bus, it went straight through them. The
landscape was the mightiest I’d seen yet, although unfortunately it wasn’t
possible to stop the bus every time I wanted to take a picture like with our
car. If you looked out the window, you could see a tiny river (actually huge)
snaking and twirling its way through the valley. Then you saw the mountainside,
and looking higher was more mountainside, then higher, then more until you
craned your neck right up to maybe catch a glimpse of the top. Was it possible
that we were seeing an entire mountain from bottom to top? The bus
crashed and rumbled and did impossible break neck turns on the road that was a
shelf cut out of the mountain, up and up and then down and down. Every possible
type of vehicle was doing the same, you don’t need a 4x4 the Indians taught me.
Just when the road got the most achingly steep and narrow, a
line of cars appeared ahead of us and the bus screeched to a halt. Looking
beyond was a long snake of cars, twisting around the mountainside with their
wheels ready to dip over the rough edge at any moment. It was a Himalayan
traffic jam. We got out and waited, I was thinking how the heck do you sort out
a traffic jam or accident on a road like this? There were paragliders swooping
around us in the air, probably having the most thrilling high altitude flights
of their life. That would scare the life out of me! We got lots of stares from
the locals, some taking pictures of us (not so) secretly on their phones. An
old mountain lady got off the bus and peed right next to the door, not minding
everyone looking on. Somehow, the cars started moving again, this time the cars
on the opposite side stopped to let our side passed. I could not believe the
tight space the cranking bus was squeezing through, all with a few hundred
metres of cliff drop on one side of us. The wheels must have been 1 inch or
less from the side, where we would certainly plunge to freefall death with one
false move. But, it got through and we glided down the steep layered valley,
taking a thousand turns and flopping side to side. And in this way we made it
down the valley to Manali.
The seven hour journey took around nine, but I
couldn’t believe it wasn’t longer. And guess how many km it is from Keylong to
Manali? Only 117km! We were dropped into the bus station in New Manali. After
being in the small mountain towns of Ledakh all the people and traffic and
noise and pollution was a shock, and the smell of human excrement coming from
the drains along the bus station was especially offensive. All three of us and
all our luggage squeezed into a tiny
auto rickshaw, and we had a lot of stuff. We were heading to Vashisht , a small
village of its own on the hillside away from the main town’s rumble.
Manali / Vashisht 1-3 July
We spent three nights in Vashisht. It’s a small hangout for
tourists of all descriptions. Ido had been there before and was being our tour
guide. We stayed in the guesthouse he knew, Rs250 for big room with bathroom all
to myself. The high season for Manali was just finishing and everyone was
heading up to Leh where it was cooler. I can imagine it teeming in high season,
it would be much too much. It was all tiny lanes and guesthouses piled on top
of each other on the mountain side with huge cows living happily in the tiny
courtyards. There were many tourist food places and shops selling the same old knickknacks,
Tibetan jewellery, woollen hats, gloves and scarves, tourist clothes. It is
very pretty there though, a green forest like mountain side with the river
running through the valley.
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| Temple in Vashisht |
There was a party on that night July 1
st, ‘Earth
Core Festival’ somewhere in a remote location on the other side of the river.
We watched the Euro Cup finals in a Korean restaurant, like a living room at
the top of a building with cushions and everyone smoking hashish, the most
unlikely audience for Football I’ve ever seen. Spain thrashed Italy, even though
I bet a beer to Ido that Italy would win (clearly I know nothing about
Football). Afterwards, in the early hour of the morning a few of us got picked
up by two cars, banging psy-trance and driving grand theft auto style through
the empty streets of Manali, slowed down only by the sheep and shepherds
crossing. We rumbled over a bridge into a tiny dark path and did a rally drive
into the dark hillside, stopping when we heard pounding trance and lasers light
up the mountainside. They wanted to charge us Rs1000 to get in, but we refused
that seriously silly number and paid Rs500 instead. It was about 2am. We went
around a rock and saw a tent set up in beautiful surroundings, with neon lights
and lasers and a tent with a bar. I love outdoor parties because they’re
outdoors, but then the mess of rubbish and people and the loud unnatural sounds
of banging trance almost ruins the outdoors bit, I always feel like the people
and what comes with them ruins it. I would rather be in that beautiful spot in
the mountains by the river without the party for sure. There were a lot of
Indian men, and men in general, hardly any girls which is what is what I find
in general in India. There was a camp fire, and people doing some (always funny
when you imagine looking at them without the music) jerky dancing. I wandered
around more bemused than into it. The sun came up, and the surroundings became
more beautiful and the people more haggard looking. Leo, Ido and I sat on rocks
in the river and watched the sky lighten around us. 6am, time to go home. A
very random, crazy night, exhausted after the long bus ride and all night
wanderings in Manali.
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| Lio, Ido and I - sunrise |
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| The trance party tent in early morning |
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| At the waterfall |
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| Mountain man Lio |
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| Ah nature |
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| Artist Lio drawing in the forest chai shop |
I liked Manali, but definitely three days was enough for me.
It isn’t rural enough to feel like you’re fully in beautiful nature, and the
town isn’t big or historical enough to spend days exploring it. Also, too many
tourists for me, I can’t imagine what it’s like in high season. There was an
Indian tourist staying in our guesthouse, who every time we were sitting on the
balcony reading a book or chatting amongst ourselves, would come and sit down
uninvited (although not really unwelcome) and wouldn’t say a word, he would just
sit with us. He was some kind of businessman, a high caste he mentioned more
than once, who had been signed off work due to some illness and told to go on
holiday. So here he was in Vashisht, sitting quietly listening to us talk or
watching us read. It was weird and interesting to us.
Were there petrol stations on that long drive through the desert valley, how did your car fill up in the middle of nowhere?
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