Not So Fast
Twelve days and one motorcycle over the highest road passes in the world, ending where the road does: at a monastery you can only walk to.
Twelve days and one motorcycle over the highest road passes in the world, ending where the road does: at a monastery you can only walk to.
Ladakh sits behind the main wall of the Himalaya, so high the monsoon gives up before it arrives. What’s left is desert at 3,400 metres, eleven thousand feet: rock, light, and rivers born from ice. Everything alive presses close to the water. From a distance the villages are green thread, stitched into stone.
In September I rode through it for twelve days on a Royal Enfield Himalayan. North over Khardung La into Nubra. East to Pangong. Then west into Zanskar, Ladakh’s farthest valley, where the road is so new the valley hasn’t decided what it thinks of it.
The Border Roads Organisation builds and rebuilds every road up here, and posts advice on yellow boards as it goes. Most of it rhymes. One board in Nubra said in seven words what the mountains had been saying all along.
“Darling, I like you, but not so fast.”
Border Roads Organisation, roadside
The route, roughly to scale. Two out-and-backs from Leh, then the long leg into Zanskar.
Leh makes you wait. At 3,500 metres (11,500 feet) the air holds two-thirds of the oxygen your body expects. The rule for the first two days is simple: do very little, slowly. So the trip begins on foot. Up the mud-brick lanes to the palace. Along the bazaar as the lights come on. Down again for tea.
Waiting, it turns out, is the right speed for this town.
Leh Palace: seventeenth century, nine storeys of mud brick, mostly empty now. Light gets in where it can. From the roof, the town ends exactly where the water does.
Namgyal Tsemo, the fort above the palace, collecting the last of the day.
Prayer wheels in the old town, and cosmos gone feral in every yard. September is the last soft month before the cold comes down.
North out of Leh the road climbs 1,800 metres (5,900 feet) in forty kilometres (25 miles), to the pass the signs call the highest motorable road in the world. The claim is contested. Your lungs will not join the argument. Then the north side opens and the argument ends: two hours of falling switchbacks into another country, where rivers braid silver across gravel beds a kilometre (over half a mile) wide.
Down the north side, where the scale stops registering until something small moves across it.
Three nights at the edge of Sumur, in a camp among the poplars. Nubra lives on snowmelt and one short summer: barley, sea buckthorn, apricots, then the long shut door of winter. The days sorted themselves into rides. The evenings sorted themselves into tea. It is hard to say which were better.
The BRO’s yellow boards keep up a running commentary the whole way down the valley: road-safety doggerel with the persistence of a younger sibling. By the third one, you stop. By the fourth, you’re fond of them.
The Border Roads Organisation, flirting.
From Nubra to Pangong there’s a shortcut: the Shyok road, pinned between the river and the rock, closed whenever either objects. It saves half a day. It charges for it in stream crossings.
Pangong Tso: 130-odd kilometres (about 80 miles) of lake. A third in India. The rest in Tibet.
Brackish, so almost nothing lives in it. At 4,200 metres (13,800 feet), not much lives around it either.
People cross two mountain ranges anyway. For this.
Back over Chang La, where September was already rehearsing winter, then down into the willow shade of the Indus. Laundry. Momos. A walk through the old town without gasping. The altitude, at last, conceded.
The old town, built for shade and defence, keeps both habits.
For most of living memory, Zanskar was reached on foot. Weeks over the passes, in summer.
Or in deep winter, on the chadar: the frozen skin of this river, walked, carefully, on ice.
The new road does the obvious, impossible thing. It follows the river through the gorge. Days become one.
The valley is still catching its breath. At its head sits Zangla, once a kingdom of its own, and a small one. In 1823 a Hungarian scholar, Csoma de Kőrös, wintered in the fort here with a local lama and began the first Tibetan–English dictionary. He worked, the story goes, wrapped in sheepskins against the cold.
Out of the gorge, the valley opens: villages again, and the wind in the flags.
Past Bardan Gompa, on its rock above the Tsarap, the tarmac thins. Then it quietly gives up.
The last hours are on foot, on a mule track cut into the slope.
Some places you should have to earn.
Phugtal has been growing out of a cave mouth for some nine hundred years, founded, the tradition holds, by Jangsem Sherap Zangpo in the early twelfth century. It is still supplied the way it always has been: by mule, one load at a time.
Zanskar’s two great monasteries face each other across the widest reach of the valley: Stongde on its ridge to the east, Karsha spilling down the mountain to the west. The plan was a quiet day of assembly halls. The valley had other ideas. A festival on the Karsha side, the whole village out by the water in its best: gonchas and turquoise, drums, butter tea by the kettleful. Ten days of rock and wind, and then this.
From the plane the whole route fits in one window. Ranges behind ranges, glaciers feeding rivers, rivers feeding valleys. Somewhere down there is the camp among the poplars. The bridge with the horse on it. The women by the water, still singing, for all I know.
Twelve days to ride it. Forty minutes to fly over it.
Not so fast, the signs kept saying. It took all twelve days to hear them.
Some places you pass through. This one passes through you.