The Long Trip Home: The Highway into Ladakh

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The Road Less Traveled

The Highway into Ladakh
by Seán Harnett

The tiny Indian province of Ladakh is located 3,600 metres above sea level in a broad plateau between the Himalaya and Karakoram mountains. When my partner and I travelled to India last year it was the place we most wanted to see. But even by Indian standards Ladakh is a difficult place to get to. You can fly there, but if you come from sea level the sudden gain in altitude will knock you sideways for the better part of a week. Alternatively, you have the option of driving there, going over the mountains in a bus or jeep or motorcycle from Manali or Srinagar, but the journey takes two days, is by all accounts a bit of a bone-shaker, and you still haven't solved the problem of rapid altitude gain. We decided, therefore, to take the third, and by far the easiest, route into Ladakh: we walked, from Darcha to Padum. It took us ten days.

We arrived in Manali, a town on the other side of the mountains from Ladakh, with firm intentions but no firm plans. A day or so after arriving, however, and we had arranged everything through a trekking agency located in the town's main bazaar. They provided us with a guide, a cook, food and cooking equipment, plus a horseman and four horses to carry most of the gear and all of the supplies. They even drove us to the trailhead at the tiny village of Darcha, which is about six hours from Manali by way of a narrow, pot-holed mountain road.

It's all utterly beautiful, especially at sunrise, when clean orange light touches the mountains and the line of shadow receding down the rocky slopes as the sun rises higher looks like a dark, diaphanous veil being slowly pulled away.

Darcha couldn't be more different from Manali. Manali lies in the path of the annual Indian monsoon, at the head of a lush, alpine valley. Darcha, on the far side of the mountains, rarely gets any rain. In fact, the land that stretches from Darcha north into Ladakh and beyond is considered to be desert; albeit cold, high-altitude desert. Very little grows there apart from stunted bushes and patches of mossy grass that look like radioactive compost. The mountains are red and bare, like huge petrified sand dunes, covered by scree and piles of tottering boulders brought down in an eternity of landslides. The taller peaks are capped with snow and ice. It's all utterly beautiful, especially at sunrise, when clean orange light touches the mountains and the line of shadow receding down the rocky slopes as the sun rises higher looks like a dark, diaphanous veil being slowly pulled away.

And we got to see the sunrise every morning because every morning we were woken by our guide at 6.30 am, just as the sun began to lighten the sky. We'd drink milky tea, eat breakfast, break camp, and be on the trail by eight or half-eight. We would walk for five or six hours through sere valleys, along and above the banks of rushing meltwater rivers, then pitch camp and have the whole afternoon to just sit and think or look at the scenery. We soon fell into the rhythm of this pace of life.

I feel most alive when I walk in mountains. I can't explain it. Some people claim to trek so that they can be alone with their thoughts. I've never quite understood that statement. I never feel more detached from my thoughts than when trekking, and never more aware of what's going on around me. This was brought home to me when we crested the Shingo-La pass, after four days of slow, steep walking up through the Janskar valley. The Shingo La pass is the highest point on the trek. At 5,100 metres it is, I must confess, neither the tallest nor the most difficult pass in the Great Himalayan Range, but I still felt as if we had achieved something. Marked by a cairn draped with thousands of fluttering Tibetan prayer flags, the pass is surrounded on all sides by massive peaks—raw-looking, snow-capped. I can't describe the sense of elation I felt standing there, breathing IN the thin, crisp air, and taking in the sight of the Himalayas spreading out far to the east and west. I had wanted to walk in these mountains since first seeing photographs of them in National Geographic magazine when I was a boy. I was not disappointed. The moment was perfect.

Understandably, the next seven days of the rest of the trek could not quite live up to that one singular moment, but I nevertheless enjoyed each remaining day thoroughly. The trail, now angling mostly downhill, brought us through the remote but inhabited Tsarap and Zanskar valleys, with their Buddhist monasteries and ancient villages. This country is inhabited by the Ladakhi people, who are closely related, ethnically and religiously, to the Tibetans. Ladakh is actually often called "Little Tibet" and is the only place left in the world—since the Chinese occupation of Tibet—where the old religious customs of Tibetan Buddhism are practised as they have been for centuries.

We were invited one evening to have supper with a Ladakhi family who lived beside the campsite where we pitched our tents. We shared sweet, milky tea and greasy barley pancakes with the family and two other guests, a Buddhist monk and his companion. Although nothing was said to us as we dined, I felt at ease in their presence. There is a real sense of hospitality in Ladakhi culture and what the family and their guests did not communicate to us in words, they communicated to us through the generosity of their laughter and the warmth of their smiles.

The physical artifacts of religion are present everywhere in these valleys. Each village is surrounded by prayer walls and chortens—shrines containing the remains of revered lamas. There are also a number of monasteries along the trail. We visited two of them. The second, at Bardan, was the largest and easily the more impressive. Built several hundred years ago on a rocky promontory jutting out into the Tsarap River, it makes an impressive sight as you approach it from the south. Inside we were shown the monastery's prayer and meditation rooms.

Except for just below the Shingo-la (when we had to cross a couple of glaciers and glacial streams) the trail was at all times dusty and rocky. For the final days of the trek, it more or less followed the course of the Tsarap River as it cut a gorge through the mountains. The slopes above and below the path were steep and occasionally sheer; the gorge opened out only occasionally, where streams running at ninety degrees to the river leapt down the mountainside to join it, irrigating fields of barley, peas and potatoes as they went. We camped hard by the banks of the Tsarap on those last nights. It's a turbulent river, noisy and wild and the sound of it filled our dreams: like a train steaming by, or the wind lashing the sea against a high storm wall. The water was the colour of gruel; loaded down with the tons of silt and glacial run-off it has picked up along its journey of, at this stage, no more than a few miles.

The Tsarap gorge did not open up until we reached the village of Raru, where we camped on our final night. All around us we could see tall, sharp peaks, like spears arrayed against the sky: all higher than 7000 metres, all covered with gleaming white snow. After we had packed up the camp the next morning and were getting ready to head off on the final stage of the trek, I stood staring at those mountains for a few minutes, trying to engrave them onto my memory, then turned as our guide called and led us away down the path.

We arrived in Padum that afternoon.