Ladakh - Crossroads of High Asia, by Janet Rizvi
"Approaches to Leh" excerpt

The route from Manali, which crosses four passes, three of them over 4800 meters, is open for no more then three-and-a-half months, from the end of June to mid-October. For almost half its length, it passes through terrain so high and so barren as to have no settled habitation. There is a minimum of infrastructural support along the way, and travelers planning their journey should aim to be self sufficient in food, warm clothing and, for travelers in their own vehicles, repair and survival kits. Buses and trucks go in convey; individual travel should also be in groups, preferably using vehicles with a four-wheel drive. There are no repair or service stations between Keylong and Leh, no petrol supply, so the party whose vehicle breaks down have no resources but their own to fall back on. On a road running for 200 kilometers at altitudes of over 4000 meters, such precautions could mean the difference between life and death.

Manali itself, formerly an important meeting point for traders from Zanskar, Lahul, Kullu and farther afield, is now, as well as the start of the journey to Leh, a major tourist destination in its own right. As it leaves the town, the route is as pretty as the lower part of the Kullu valley, passing through hamlets and apple orchards by the side of the foaming Beas. From Palchan starts the zigzag ascent up the slopes of the Pir Panjal, a major subsidiary of the Great Himalaya, through impressive mixed forests of pine and deodar, oak, chestnut and rhododendron, till the road clears the tree line and starts up the open mountain slopes to the Rohtang Pass (3978 meters). The pass itself is broad and flat; just below its crest rises a spring which is one of the sources of the Beas. Neither particularly high (by Himalayan standards) nor particularly difficult underfoot, the Rohtang is nevertheless regarded with some trepidation by local travelers on account of the unpredictable gales and blizzards to which it is subject.

Although Lahul, the district which the road now enters, is not actually part of the Trans-Himalaya, since the Great Himalaya remains to be crossed, it lies in the rain-shadow of the Pir Panjal, and the view ahead could well be a trans-Himalayan landscape. In contrast to the lush green-forested slopes of the Kullu valley to the south, the traveler is confronted with a vista of treeless mountains, culminating in snow-covered peaks and ridges stretching away as far as the eye can see. Upper Lahul consists of the valleys of the Chandra and Bhaga rivers, both of which rise in the Great Himalaya, close under the Bara-lacha-la, but flow off in opposite directions, looping round to meet near Keylong, the district capital, and flowing off to the north-west as the Chenab.

From the Rohtang, the road hurtles down into the valley of the Chandra, which it follows in a north-west direction to its confluence with the Bhaga. The villages are quite different from those of Manali. The Kullu style with its deep wooden verandas and sloping roofs of slate or shingle gives way to a more Tibetan manner of architecture; the houses with their small windows and constructed from adobe bricks or stone cemented with mud, often whitewashed, and with flat roofs for storing winter forage for the livestock. This style of dwelling will soon become familiar in Ladakh. Although Lahul's political history has been a chequered one, sovereignty over it being claimed at different times by the rulers of Kullu and of Ladakh, its cultural links were mainly with Ladakh, and its general ambiance forms as good an introduction to Ladakh as any.

In the days of the traffic in grain and wool between Kullu and the high-altitude pastures of Ladakh and Tibet, the Lahul people profited from their situation mid-way between the two end-points of the trade by acting as carriers. William Moorcroft, the first European to traverse the route, remarked on Te excellence of their horses. Since the discovery about a century ago that conditions in the district are ideal for growing potatoes, the farmers no longer confine their operations to subsistence agriculture. Seed potatoes are a cash crop that can be raised sustainably, year after year, and have brought enormous prosperity to Lahul; most of the fields in the oasis villages that the road passes through are devoted to their cultivations. The high-altitude pastures of the Pir Panjal and the Great Himalaya's southern flank are the summer destination of the transhumant Gaddi shepherds, part of whose trek to and from their traditional grazing runs may take them along the motor road. The picture as a convoy of vehicles jostles for way with a flock of several hundred sheep and goats can be better imagined then described. The shoving and thrusting as the vehicles edge their way through, the shouting, the excitement; the Gaddis themselves, Biblical-looking in their rough woolen homespun girdled by a rope wound round and round the waist, often carrying a lamb or a kid in the pouch of their tunic; it all adds up to a scene of good-humored pandemonium, which at the same time represents a collision between the modern world and another, archaic and timeless.

Crossing the Chandra at Khoksar, the first village, an unlovely straggle of shacks and tea-shops, the road remains on the right bank, its line contouring along the mountainside high above the water. Near the confluence of the two rivers at the village of Tandi, it crosses the muddy and turbulent waters of the Bhaga to its left bank, and starts to rise again, following the river up to Keylong, the nearest thing to a town the traveler will see until Leh, still 360 kilometers away, is reached. Now the valley narrows, and the road remains high on the constricting walls of its gorge, passing the two Buddhist monasteries of Tayul and Gemur. It opens out again at Darcha, into a wide plain where the principal trail to Zanskar, along the Barai Nala and over the Shingo-la, diverges from the main road. Across the river, a trekking route takes off through the mountains to the south and east, and back to the Chandra valley. On again, still following the course of the Bhaga, to the bridge at Patseo, till the 1950s an important meeting-place for traders from Zanskar, Kullu and Rupshu as well as Lahul itself, where salt and wool from the high-altitude lands ahead were bartered for food-grains, tea and other essential commodities brought up from Kullu and Zanskar. From this point almost the only signs of human habitation till the first villages of the Leh district some 200 kilometers ahead, will be the occasional tea-stalls and rudimentary 'hotels' of seasonal entrepreneurs catering to the needs of travelers, and a few crude constructions put up by the Army and the paramilitary Border Roads Organization which is responsible for maintaining the road.

The sole permanent inhabitants of the desolate region known as Rupshu between the Bara-lacha and Tag-lang Passes are a few thousand Chang-pa, nomadic herds people living in yak-hair tents. All over the Chang-thang, Tibet's vast northern plateau land of which Rupshu is the south-eastern extremity, similar communities make the only possible economic use of this unpromising landscape by raising flocks of sheep, goats, and yak on widely scattered pastures where the grass, though scanty, is reportedly highly nutritious. The Chang-pa goats are the source of pashm, better known as 'cashmere', the raw material of the Kashmir shawl industry and now in demand worldwide as one of the softest, warmest and most delicate woolen fibers. Although the Chang-pa are known as a good-humored and cheerful people, their lifestyle is one which most of us might consider to be of the most appalling discomfort, especially in winter; even during the brief summer when the tourists are passing, their encampments seem to be on the rough and ready side. It takes an effort of the imagination to visualize the transformation of the rough, greasy, matted mass of fibers, as the pashm is combed from the goat's back, into exquisite knitwear fetching enormous prices in Harrods or Bloomingdale's.

The road crosses to the left bank of the Bhaga at Patseo, and continues to follow it up to the grazing ground of Zingzingbar and as far as its source in the lovely little mountains lake of Suraj Tal. Now it hairpins up the stony mountainside to reach the watershed of the Great Himalaya, which it crosses by the famous Bara-lacha-la (4892 meters), a pass possibly unique in having a tri-junction at its summit, with a trail taking off towards the south-east, down the Chandra valley and eventually over into Spiti. The road to Leh carries on in a northerly direction, down past glacial lakelets, following the upper waters of a river, the Yonam, that drains the surrounding mountains but, deep in its trough, can do nothing to temper the prevailing aridity, till it reaches the Chang-pa pasture and camping ground of Sarchu, the take-off point for a truly rugged trek through the mountains to the monastery of Phugtal in Zanskar. For travelers doing no more then skim on four wheels across this bleak lunar landscape en route from one point to another, the names of the pastures are practically irrelevant, except as they may be the stations chosen by the tea-stall owners to provide some basic services. For the Chang-pa, on the other hand, each grazing ground has its own particular character, since their transhumance follows a strict system of movement from on to another, and they have a keen eye for variations that altogether escape the one-time traveler.

It is just short of Sarchu, at Phalung Danda, an isolated rock rising out of the plain, that the road leaves Himachal Predesh and enters Ladakh. The Yonam valley debouches into that of the Tsarap, a more considerable river fed by the glaciers of the Great Himalaya's northern flank, which marks the divide between the Great Himalaya and the Zanskar range, and which, after a tortuous course through the mountains, becomes a principal affluent of Zanskar's Lungnak river. The road has isolated stretches that run ruler-straight, across the plains dotted with more isolated rock pillars, between Sarchu and the bridge over the Tsarap, whose right bank it follows down for some 25 kilometers past more Chang-pa camping-grounds. It then takes off up a side valley, zigzagging up in 21 hairpins, an abrupt ascent of nearly 1000 meters in ten kilometers of distance, to the Lunga-lacha-la (5059 meters), through one ridge of the Zanskar range. The tortured shapes of rock and mountain, and the amazing verity of their colors do offer some compensation for the exhausting struggle to the top, as taxing for the driver as for the vehicle. The decent is easier, down the left bank of a small stream to the staging-post of Pang, an amphitheater of rock and sand, where the landscape bears testimony to the awesome power of nature to alter the form of the hardest stone. Its cliffs are honeycombed with caves, and eroded by wind and extremes of temperature into fantastic spires and pinnacles, which remind some world travelers of a mini-Grand Canyon.

The crossing of another two rivers near their confluence brings the road out onto the Morey Plain. This seemingly waterless basic, for or five kilometers across and over 40 in length, undulating at an average level of 4700 meters, seems to offer no possibilities of supporting life. Nevertheless, some Chang-pa do occasionally set up camp there, as a base for reaching pastures towards the top of the neighboring side valleys. Even more surprisingly, a lucky few of those crossing it may be able to spot wildlife ¡V mainly in the form of marmots, mountain-dwelling rodents about the size of a beaver, whose luxuriant fur and clumsy seeming gait are belied by the ease and completeness with which they can disappear into their burrows, and frustrate any attempt to examine them more closely; or sometimes the occasional heard of fleet-footed kyang, the Tibetan wild ass.

At the end of the plain the surrounding mountains draw in, and it is through the valley of a seasonal stream, and past a small lake, that the road approaches Debring, an important Chang-pa camping ground, at the foot of the ascent to the last and highest of the passes, the Tag-lang-la (5325 meters), over yet another branch of the Zanskar range. The ascent is straightforwards enough; and once over the pass there is a frisson of excitement at the realization that at last the Indus basic has been reached: the stream that joins the road a little way below the pass is tributary to the Gya river, which flows direct into the Indus. The fields of Rumtse, the first village of Ladakh, poor enough those they may be at an altitude of 4420 meters, are a refreshment to the eye starved so long of the sight of anything but the sparsest of village ¡V the green of its fields contrasting uncompromisingly with the bare brown of the barren mountain slopes, which here lack even the short grassy cover characteristic of Lahul ¡V becomes a little bigger and its vegetation (comparatively) more luxuriant, with her and there plantations of willows, their heads bushy from repeated pollarding. Gya, the first village after Rumtse, was in old Ladakh the headquarters of a tiny chiefship, its ruler enjoying the honorific title of Cho.

And so on down the Gya stream ¡V past the village of Miru where for the first time since leaving Patseo the road dips to below 4000 meters ¡V to Upshi on the Indus, a turbulent silt-laden river snaking down its gorge between the Zanskar and Ladakh ranges. Now it is reasonably plain sailing, a two-hour drive along the river to Leh. Some five kilometers below Upshi at the village of Igu, a bridge carries the road over to the right bank; and shortly after; at Karu, a wide valley opens up to the right. This valley is the start of the route over the Chang-la to the Pang-gong Lake and on, either to western Tibet, or up the Shayok gorge on the winter caravan route to central Asia. Another bridge leads across the Indus to the secluded glen where Hemis, Ladakh's most famous gompa (monastery) is situated. Now the valley begins to broaden out, and right in the center rises a huge rocky eminence, crowned by the impressive pile of Stakna Gompa. The road now passes through villages, whose fields almost merge into each other: Ranbipura, carved out of the desert during the reign of the Maharaja Ranbir Singh towards the end of the nineteenth century; and Tikse, the huge pile of its gompa dominating the fields and houses of the village. Shey is situated barely above the level of the river, and some of its land is subject to occasional flooding. Its houses scattered among the fields, the village is focused on the commanding bulk of the old palace, atop a ridge running out from the surrounding mountains toward a river, and with even more ancient ruined fort crowning the heights above. Across the river lie the broad fields of Chushot, and, at the base of the Zanskar range, the villages of Matho and Stok.

Nearly there now. Past Choglamsar, with its Tibetan refugee settlement and the Jeevan Sthal the Dalai Lama's prayer enclosure; past a kilometer long mani wall, through the urban sprawl of Leh's outskirts, the road finally meets the main highway from down the Indus, and in a couple of bounds has got right up the hill and into the main bazaar. At last, the bright lights of Leh.