On the evening of 27th September 2015 commenced a journey of a kind I’d not embarked on in the past: a bike ride in Ladakh which was to last longer than a week by a day. My wonderful company was to be Kirubakaran, Prithivirajan, Saravanan, Muthukumar (all 58th batch Aero from MIT, like myself), Hariharan and George. I’d dreamed of it for quite some time. I discovered that there were others who shared this dream. Muthu germinated the plan and Prithivi propogated it to me, Hari and George. All that remained was for us to convince Kiruba and Saravanan. The latter, possessor of a razor sharp intellect and an inexhaustible repository of humour, required a long phone call one night in the course of which Prithivi and I alternately reasoned, cajoled and brainwashed him into agreeing to join the bandwagon. Kiruba was lured successfully into the trap through the machinations of Prithivi. All of us, with the exception of Muthu, who is more usefully employed, are Government Servants. Therefore, the burden our air tickets fell on His Excellency, the President of India, thanks to the LTC scheme.
A tentative route and plan was arrived at by Muthu and Prithivi at a very early stage and circulated. I did not care to look at it until a month before the trip. As providence would have it, I was flanked by David and Tushar (Tushy) who gave one gape at it and burst into peals of laughter. For the first time, I looked at it critically and realized that more than 2000 km of hill road in nine days could not be expected to possibly elicit any other reaction. But, my group, being the daredevil lot that it was, would require patient and insurmountable logic to mellow down the plan. This was when David came up with the brilliant scheme of asking for Anish’s opinion as the latter had done more or less the same back-cracking mistake a year previously. A Missive with the Plan attached was sent and an Opinion sought. The rejoinder, a worthy morsel of epistolary literature, is worth a verbatim quote:
“Dear Mr. Raghavan [sic],
“Are u crazy, racing from Solang valley to Leh in 2 days? Unless u want to set some stupid record & enjoy NOTHING on the way, it is ill advised. The last stretch to Leh MUST be savored.
“Aug end there might be no snow. But AMS is always there. Beware. Are all in group fully fit? One is enough to ruin d party.
“We covered 2500 km in 10 days. But regretted flying past everything beautiful. Everyday’s destination was just a place to sleep. The beautiful mighty Himalayas are everywhere on the way. So slow down. Stop now n then. It helps in preventing/delaying AMS and makes ur trip enjoyable.
“To be continued… :p
“Anish Krishnan”
It is a pity, I admit, that he did not continue as he had promised. It was like Kambar decided to stop with Baalakaandam. However, when I showed the above exchange to Prithivi, he conceded that the original plan perhaps was not in the best interests of our hindquarters. The next week saw furious research (on Prithivi’s and Muthu’s part), and the duo came up with Plans A and B. These plans ensured that we started and ended our journey in Leh. This was as much because of the Government’s idiosyncrasies (which declared that a trip to Manali did not warrant sponsorship as did a trip to J&K) as due to practical considerations of bike renting. Both Plans achieved much awaited cuts in total distance covered and included most of the must-sees.
Meanwhile, Prithivi and I fought a different battle on the home ground trying to convince the administrative mandarins in our office that Leh was indeed part of J&K. It was almost too late to book tickets by the time the mandarins spoke to more mandarins and convinced themselves that Geography books were not lying.
The next item of the programme was gear hunting. Being a veteran of many a fall, I did not kid myself that I could ride as far as we had planned without sustaining a scratch. My kitty already included a decent helmet, a riding jacket with elbow and back protection, and a pair of riding gloves. Only my knees remained unprotected. I visited the Cramster outlet in Bangalore with Prithivi and bought a pair of knee-guards for myself and riding balaclavas for everyone. Besides, there was the matter of fastening a bag to the bike. I’d always ridden in the past with a backpack, which is fine for a three-day ride. Our trip would require a rucksack, at the very least. I had a good one, but it would require bungee ropes and the likes. Instead, I read up on saddlebags in teambhp site and zeroed on Viaterra Claw, which would serve its purpose in my own KTM Duke 200 as well as in most other bikes.
Which brings us to the matter of bikes. Muthu had been reading blog after blog on bike riding in Leh and chosen a bike-renting agency called ladakhbikerental.com. I would have preferred to ride a Duke with which I was comfortable. Not to put too fine a point, I hate Royal Enfields of all colours and stripes. Saru, sharing my dislike of the Royal Poppycock, had asked for a Hero Impulse. As destiny would have it, only the former was for the taking, besides Bajaj Avenger. Though not a big fan of the Avenger either, I put down my name for it. The thought process was that, devils can be reasoned with, not the deep sea.
The week before the trip, I had travelled quite a bit, blessing a couple in Trichy and doing some office work in Vizag. I arrived panting and anxious in Bangalore the day before the trip, which gave me around thirty-six hours to catch my breath and pack my bag. During the time in which I had been touring the Deccan, my fellow travellers had raided Decathlon and bought pairs of rubber boots from a shop buried deep in Shivajinagar. The day I returned, I visited the shop and bought an uncomfortable and unwieldy pair, which I painfully squeezed into the saddlebag. I would not use the boots again.
By the evening of the next day, we were all packed and shivering with excitement. George, Prithivi, Kiruba and I booked a cab and snailed our way to the airport to catch our flight to Delhi. Our Air India plane was the Dreamliner which, I’m sad to say, after all the hype, was a let down. The luggage cabin above the seats shook like nonagenarian limbs during take-off and landing, and leg-space was negligible. Admittedly, it was big. Big deal. Mercifully, there was a TV on the back of all seats and a decent selection of films in most languages.
We reached Delhi at around eleven where Saravanan, who’d already flown in from Hyderabad, received us. The flight to Leh was scheduled early next morning. We snatched a few hours of sleep in the airport before Saru woke us at quarter past four. As luck would have it, our flight to Leh was at the farthest possible gate in Terminal 3. We rushed to our gate and boarded the plane. I had the window seat and Prithivi’s seat was next to mine. We were able to catch glimpses of Manali, Tso Moriri Lake and Pangong Tso Lake through our window.
An hour later, we found ourselves at Leh where Hari, his brother Shankar and their father Natarajan sir were waiting for us. In two taxis, we went to the DRDO Guest House in Leh. That day, we had planned to stay put: travelogues are unanimous that 36 hours of acclimatization is mandatory. Later that morning, George sir had an acute stomachache and was admitted in the only hospital in Leh. All day, Natarajan sir and his sons sat by his bed and moved him from lab to lab to take test after test. Saravanan spent the night in the hospital.
Next day we went to the bike renting shop where I got my Avenger and the others, between themselves, got two Classic 500’s, one Classic 350 and one Electra. The bikes, I’m sorry to say, were like humans. They came with Character and Mood-swings. Some suffered from morning sickness. Some boomed and vibrated so much so that the Richter scale hit the four mark when these bikes were around. Mine, as it happened, had a front tyre with a mirror’s surface finish. While this is a comely attribute on a mirror, it is not really sought after in a bike tyre. When I pointed this out to the bike owner, he requested that I put up with it for a day at the end of which he’d give me another better Avenger. With an uneasy mind and an uneasier bike, we set out to achieve the day’s objective of Magnetic Hill and Zanskar-Indus confluence.
And so began the actual riding part. We first sped to the Zanskar-Indus confluence and fought a mental battle as to whether to take a dip or not and decided against it. I do regret that decision, but, hey, the water was stone cold! The magnetic hill is a stretch of road on the Leh-Srinagar highway where your bike apparently defies gravity and moves uphill. This is not true of course. It is actually an optical illusion of sorts where the gradient of the road plays tricks on your eyes. Reader, do not waste your time in this place. By this time, I had ridden nearly fifty km in the bloody Avenger and was not the least bit fascinated by it. We sped back to Leh to the bike guys. I gritted my teeth and asked for a Classic 500 single seater. The bike and I would spend the rest of the trip pretty much like the tiger and Pi in the little boat.
We went to the hospital to check on George and found that he was no better. The local doctors had told that the best thing to do would be to send him back to a lower altitude. As is typical in Leh, there was no power that evening, so I called Anil in Bangalore and had him book George tickets back to Bangalore for the morning after the next.
Next morning, the rest of us left to Khardungla from where we would proceed to Diskit, Nubra Valley. We’d arranged for Natarajan sir and Shankar to print out George’s tickets and fixed with the DRDO guesthouse staff to see him off safely to the airport the next day. Somewhere on the way to Khardungla, I received a phonecall from Shankar. As luck would have it, there was a hartal in Leh that day and there was no place he could take a print out of the ticket. Since he and his father had a bus to Srinagar to catch that afternoon, we were in a bit of a fix.
This is when Prithvi and I decided that we’d touch Khardungla and head back to Leh and take care of the situation there while the others carried on to Nubra valley. We resumed our ride. The last fifteen km to Khardungla is legendry for its rockiness. There is a semblance of road but in reality, it’s just mud, stones and gravel. We humped and bumped and jumped our way up and reached the ‘Rider’s Everest’. Khardungla, sitting at more than 18000ft altitude is officially the world’s highest motorable pass. This is disputed because conspiracy theorists believe China has crossed the 20000ft mark.
There was a board that warned the visitor that to spend more than 25 minutes was to invite physical debilitation. Unfortunately we ignored it. After clicking a hundred pics, a perfect stranger suggested that we dance, because apparently this was tradition. Being the pig-headed bunch that we were, we actually danced. After a minute, we knew something was wrong, as suddenly, the world was spinning and the bowels were acting funny. We staggered to chai shop to catch our breath. Over tea, we agreed that we were idiots and decided to flee the place before AMS brought us to our knees. At this point, I would like to register my boundless admiration for those Czech people who rode all the way up by bicycle!
Prithvi and I did a U-turn, while the others proceeded further. I felt so sick on the way back, that after we reached guesthouse, I parked the bike and sat down on the road for five minutes to stabilize myself. After a couple of hours’ rest, we were all right. The hartal was to end at six thirty in the evening. We headed back to the city at seven and took print outs of the ticket. Next day morning, we saw George off at Leh Airport. The rest of the lot were to arrive that evening from Nubra valley, so we had a day to kill. We decided to go monastery hunting. We first went to the monastery at Hemis, a quiet farming village off the Manali-Leh highway on the banks of the eponymous river. The monastery contains a very interesting collection of Buddhist artefacts which, I’m afraid I was not able to appreciate as much as I’d have liked to because I know so little of Buddhist history and mythology. India is such a ridiculously diverse country. Still, the paintings and solitude and solemnity of the place did evoke a profound sense of awe.
The other monastery we visited was the one at Thiksey. This one was situated up atop a hill. It had a huge Maithreya Buddha, the friendly Buddha with such a charming smile that you could spend the day just smiling back at him.
Then we took a small detour to Spituk and spent a few quiet moments with the Indus as the sun set. We returned to Leh to find that the rest of the gang had returned from Nubra and had booked a lovely homestay run by a hospitable couple. We went back to the mechanics and fixed some of the several issues that any person who rides a Royal Enfield routinely faces.
Next morning, we geared up and started for Pangong Lake. The way to Pangong is kaleidoscopic in the sense that the geographical variety one encounters every few kilometres is pretty amazing. Around mid-way is the Changla pass at 17500ft. After Khardungla, we had the good sense to spend only time enough to take a few pics and scarper.
Between Changla and Pangong, there’s a town called Tangtse. Here, we were unexpectedly stopped by jawans at the local army outpost. We proceeded with caution to find out what the issue might be, hoping against hope that we should not be turned back. It turned out that the regiment there was mostly comprised of Sikhs who served free Prasad to all passers-by! Having received it with gratitude, not to mention relief, we continued on. This, I must say was the most beautiful stretch of that day’s journey with a river here, a pasture there, a clear sky with a lone eagle hovering and of course, the cuddly marmots. Mercifully, the road was perfect all the way and we got the first glimpse of Pangong.
Pangong Lake, or Pangong Tso, is one of those lakes into which water flows in but not out, like Caspian Sea. It is a breath-taking water-body 134 km long, of which 60% is claimed by Tibetan China. We rode to Spangmik, a small village of tents and cottages on the edge of the lake and rented a couple of rooms. The lake was so mesmerizing that I threw my luggage in the room and sped to the banks and sat there, soaking in the serenity, as small freezing waves washed my feet. I tasted the water and was surprised to find that it was salty, like Caspian Sea.
As night fell, the mercury plummeted and we huddled in the warmth of our rooms and planned the rest of the journey which was to be Leh- Kargil-Drass-Leh. The original plan had been to go to Tso Moriri, another lake. But we’d read in blogs that the road to it was worse than Khardungla. We decided it was not worth the risk to see another lake, that too in the rickety Enfields. Next morning, we spent an hour in the place where Kareena Kapoor rides her bike in the climax of Three idiots which, incidentally was shot in Pangong. Then we stated the day’s journey back. We reached Karu, a kind of cross-roads forty km from Leh.
Here some of our group still had a desire to explore Tso Moriri while the rest of us were not very particular about it. We talked about it and decided that we’d part ways and meet again in Leh, three days later. Prithivi, Hari and Saru went on to Chumathang that night from where they would proceed to Tso Moriri the next day and return to Leh, the day after that. Kiruba, Muthu and I went back to Leh. That night we had a delicious dinner at a Dosa joint (true story J) in Leh and got our bikes checked. It emerged that my leaky bike had almost run out of oil and that I had escaped by the skin of my teeth. I thanked several Gods for giving me the good sense to return to Leh and had a refill of oil.
Next morning, we started quite early on the road called Vijayak which connects Leh to Srinagar via Kargil. A magnificent feat of civil engineering, it winds its way through some of the most beautiful little towns in the region with a river giving the rider company almost all the time. The road is flawlees almost all the way except for a short stretch just before Kargil.
The state of Jammu and Kashmir can be split into three regions: Jammu, Kashmir and Ladakh. Ladakh in turn has two districts: Leh and Kargil. The demographics of the place is very interesting. Leh people are mostly Tibetan Buddhist. Kargil people are Shia Muslim. Kashmiris mostly are Sunni Muslim and a majority of Jammu residents are Hindu. I say this to impress upon the reader the change in humanity and terrain that I witnessed from dawn to dusk. Morning to noon, it was moonland and sand. Then on, the gradient started and we started to see more greenery. Posters of Dalai Lama started to be replaced with those of Ayotulla Khomeini. Long processions of hijab clad girls returning from schools waved happily to passing bikes.
We reached Kargil earlier than we’d planned, thanks to the quality of the roads. From there, we decided we would push all the way to Dras, which demarcates Kashmir from Ladakh. We reached Dras at around five thirty and checked into a J&K tourism run guesthouse. We’d ridden 300km of ghat roads that day. It is fortunate that we went to Dras, because Drass is one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen. Famed as the world’s second coldest human-inhabited town, it is also home to verdant slopes and gushing steams that reminded me of scenes of Scotland from Skyfall. Since another hour of daylight remained, we set out to explore the town. We dropped into a local chai shop where the gossipy owner told us stories of Kargil war, which was mostly fought in Dras. He told us how they had remained underground fearing attacks by the Pakistanis and how it had taken nearly three months for them to resume normal life. He showed us the way to a wooden bridge across the Dras River. We rushed there to see the sun set. While we were clicking photo after photo, we were treated with the fascinating spectacle of a cow swiming across the ice-cold river to resounding cheers from onlookers.
We had a quiet dinner in the local restaurant and retired to our room. Around five in the morning, I was woken up by the cry of ‘Allaho Akbar’ a loud speaker from a neighbouring mosque. Though initially annoyed, I soon realized that the guy was actually singing it soulfully, pretty much to the tune of the Tamil song ‘Ellorum kondaduvom’. I listened to it, wondering why they don’t employ such singers in other mosques, because until then, the morning call for prayer that I’d heard had always been sung off-key. This moment, I think, was the high point of the trip and I’d have travelled all the way just to listen to this faceless person sing.
Next morning, we proceeded with the customary warm up of the Royal Beast. This is when the Classic 500 started polluting the clean Dras air with copious amount of smoke. With trepidation, I went in search of the nearest mechanic who said that it was very common in Dras for the engine oil to freeze. He asked me to warm it up a little more so that the oil would melt. Wishing that he was right, we started our journey back. The day’s first stop was at the Kargil War Memorial situated 5km from Dras. It’s an impressive memorial set against a grand backdrop of hills most of which were wrestled from Pak infiltrators thanks to our valiant armed forces.
We stopped for lunch at Kargil.
Me: “What’s there for lunch?”
Waiter: “Mutton biryani, mutton wazwan, mutton rice, mutton kebab…”
Me: “Something vegetarian?”
Waiter: “Vegetarian, sir?”- look of utter disbelief- “I can somehow manage some dal from somewhere…”
By this time, I decided I’d try another restaurant where they’d have more choice in the vegetarian segment. There was no such restaurant. No fewer than three restaurants showed me the door when I asked for veg food. Thus chastened, I tucked my tail between my feet and returned to the original restaurant and begged the waiter to get me the dal he’d promised.
After lunch, we resumed our journey back at a more leisurely pace as we had a day and a half to complete a journey we’d accomplished in a day. Even so, it was dark by the time we managed to get a tent by the river Indus in a little village called Nurla. This was so because most rooms were booked as a big Buddhist festival was in progress. I slept dreamlessly to the lullaby of the gushing Indus. “Sindhu nadhiyin misai nilavinile…”
Next day was to be the last day of our tour. We started from Nurla to Leh and decided we’d try rafting in the Indus as we had enough time to kill. We located a rafting service in a place called Uletopo. I was pleasantly surprised to find that in this remote corner of India, someone had taken the pains to buy rafts, apparel and accessories. They had even hired trained and certified rafters. We negotiated a very reasonable price and went rafting. Since the river was not at its most sumptuous, I won’t say it was extremely thrilling, but it did have its moments.
Somewhere midway, we were thrown into the river where we almost froze into glaciers. And when we were finished with the rafting, we were served hot tea. What more can you ask?
After all this, we feasted on apples and apricots plucked from trees and started back to Leh. We reached Leh in the evening around the time the Tso Moriri gang reached Leh. Together, we had a happy evening visiting Shanti Stupa – yet another monastery – in the city and returned the bikes. A note on the bikes. The bikes are only as good as the manufacturers, so Royal Enfield will only be Royal Enfield. But the support provided by ladakhbikerental.com was as good as anyone could have hoped for and I’m grateful for their services.
Next morning was our flight back home to Bangalore. That morning, it rained an enchanting rain. I felt blessed. It was a fitting climax to a soulful journey. And so ended our Yathra. Yathra is a narcotic. It subordinates you, it elevates you, it educates you, it humbles you. It filters the noise and amplifies only that which matters. It teaches you friendship and kindness. Once a Yathri, always a Yathri.