I was groggy as I sat waiting at 6 a.m., together with a couple of Israeli guys who were also taking an 8-person Jeep from Vashisht to Leh, a trip that takes two full days. It is a trip that traverses the 2nd highest motorable road in the world, crossing various extremely high passes of the Himalayan mountains. (The highest is also in this area of India.) About the time the Jeep showed up, a French guy appeared as well. The Jeep driver checked our tickets, put the French guy’s pack and my pack on top of the Jeep, and motioned for us to get in. As we drove down the hill, someone motioned to the driver, and without a word, he immediately turned around and went right back to where we'd been, picked up the two Israelis, and departed a second time. I had the best seat in the Jeep---which turned out to be a VERY good thing….nothing to hit my knees on, nobody crammed up next to me, no smelly armpits in my face for hours on end.....I was in a single seat with nothing in front of me, and nobody to the side. We proceeded to pick up a Scottish couple, who sat in the front seat next to the driver, and two more Israeli guys. It was a bit of a weird, motley crew…the French guy didn’t speak any English, and the Scottish man was a very anal-retentive investment banker on vacation for 3 weeks, putting complete trust in the driver at all times…even saying at one point, “if he didn’t know what he was doing, he wouldn't have gotten the job! He's a professional!” (As though driving a Jeep across the Himalayas is anything like getting a job at an investment bank! If you own a Jeep and are willing to drive the course, that makes you the driver.) And one of the Israeli guys was nice but a somewhat clueless guy who talked as if he knew everything, having done this trip before., annoying the French man and providing entertainment for the rest of us.
The scenery on this trip was like none I’ve seen before, and it changed dramatically at each stage. As we drove out of Manali, we were alongside a raging river, the snows having melted in early June, with huge mountains rising up both sides of the gorge. It was very green, and the valley was quite populated. At times, cows or goats would cross the road, and at one point the French guy pointed to the goats, looked at me, and said, “Pashmina.” It was one of two words he said in English the whole trip. The road (the entire trip) was 1 and a half lanes (or thereabouts), paved some of the time, some of the time not. It wound around the mountains like a corkscrew, around one side of the mountain, crossing a river, then winding its way up and around the next mountain, one after another. As I looked back at where we had been, the road looked like a snake’s path in the desert sand after it has passed through. Sheer drop-offs were the norm, me often staring directly down not just a big cliff, but an entire mountain, all the way to the bottom. At two points we saw vehicles which had met their destiny off the edges of cliffs. The road had no railing (this is India, after all) and we traversed hairpin turn after hairpin turn, the driver honking his horn at each one to warn oncoming traffic of the potential danger. He could have taken the turns a little slower, in my opinion, (but again, this is India). As we drove further and further up into the mountains, the scenery changed from greenery to desert moonscape-like scenery. I often sat with my head out the window, gaping at the beautiful scenery of the mountains. They were often bluish, but sometimes pink, with no clouds now and a crystal blue sky, snow-peaked mountains rising out of the lower ones from time to time. We went over Rohtan pass, which was 15,200 feet tall….and all of us experienced some form of headache from the altitude.
The first day, we crossed several small streams which ran across the road. Most of them were pretty small, and caused no real problems. One, however, was quite large. The driver took it quite hesitantly, and when he started getting stuck we all said that we should get out to make the Jeep lighter. Instead, the driver just kept spinning the wheels, riding the clutch and creating heaps of smoke out the back. Eventually, a few of us got out while he was still spinning the wheels in the rock and water, digging himself deeper and deeper in. The Scottish man said that the man knew what he was doing, in a threatening tone to the rest of us, who ignored him. The rest of the people eventually got out, the French man being the last….after it was very evident that every hand was needed to push (except mine, I was busy videotaping!) A long time passed, and nothing happened except the Jeep going deeper and deeper into the riverbed. Finally a busload of people showed up, and helped to push us out (it took about 15 people all pushing at the same time.) We cheered, then all piled in the Jeep and went on, but the Jeep was never quite the same…it began burning oil and having loud backfire on the uphill climbs in the high altitude.
We stopped at several small stations to drink tea, use the (lack of) facilities, (i.e. rocks behind buildings or semi-private areas behind the buildings due to the most unsanitary “toilets” I have ever seen), and register our passport information at various police stands. Registering meant that they wrote down our names and passport & visa numbers in a large book, never to look at the info again in this mess of Indian red-tape. As we encountered more and more of these stations, we noticed that in order to be in the Indian army, you must be: a) taller than average, and b) wear a moustache.
We headed to Darcha, which was where we would stay the night. As we neared our destination, at 13,900 feet high, there were various tent sites where we could pay a few dollars and be provided with dinner, breakfast, warm blankets, and a tent. The first place we stopped wanted to charge us 150 rupees pp per night, which is the equivalent of about $3. Our Israeli friend who had been on the trip before was the negotiator, telling us that there would be more tents up ahead that were cheaper. (You always want to get the cheapest deal in India, for some reason….) The French man stormed out of the Jeep, mumbling something in French with the word “Businessman…” in his sentence. Weirdy!! We decided to move on and choose another tent site where all of us could sleep in the same tent. (Except the French guy, who didn’t join us at all and disappeared to another tent as soon as we arrived.) We found one, a kind of Arab looking round tent where a lady had a kitchen set up, ready to sell us sodas and cookies and cook dinner. We sat down on the round bed-like structure lining the tent, commenting that it was hard as a rock. When we lifted up the thin layer of cloth on top of it, someone pointed and said, “It IS a rock!” The bed had been made of layers of shale-like rock, all stacked up. There was another round tent where we would sleep. This one was just for eating and hanging out. We played cards, listened to one of the Israeli guys play the guitar, talked about the Iraq war and what’s going on between Israel and Lebanon now, and waited impatiently for our food—rice with lentils and cooked veggies with curry flavor, very tasty! At around 9 p.m., we all went outside, to go over to our tent and set up for the night. And when I stepped out of the 1st tent, I could not believe my eyes. There were more stars in the clear sky than I have ever seen. In fact, there were so many that I could hardly even find the constellations I know….there were just so many! The entire Milky Way was visible—a huge tube of white light which stretched across the sky, containing more and more stars. After standing with a couple of other people and admiring the stars for a few minutes, I saw a few shooting stars as well. After admiring the stars for almost an hour, we decided to crash out. (The air was so thin up there that some Jeep trips even provide oxygen. Unfortunately, ours was not one of those.) I was really cold after standing outside for a while, and it took me a long time to get warm. But I really couldn’t breathe well, and so I didn’t get a wink of sleep at all. At one point I looked at my watch at 2 a.m. and drank some of someone else’s water, completely thirsty. At around 2:30, one of the Israeli guys, Ori, got up to go to the bathroom. I was so thrilled that someone else was awake that I flashed my flashlight at him and asked what he was doing, telling him that I couldn’t sleep. He told me to come outside when he got back. I dragged a bunch of blankets across people in the tent, and went outside to watch the stars, which had changed significantly from earlier, and now there was a moon. The Scottish woman soon joined us, and the 3 of us huddled and told stories for about an hour. Then I said, “hey, let’s build a fire…do you think there’s any wood we could find?” Ori set out to find some, and I went to get matches. He found a few boards scattered around, but since we were well above tree-line, we couldn’t find much to burn. We found a cardboard box and used some toilet paper to get it lit, and we had a beautiful fire! We warmed our toes and brought in the morning daylight, outside wrapped in heavy blankets by the fire. What could have been a completely miserable existence lying alone in the tent not being able to sleep turned into a great experience. The next day, however…I suffered from lack of sleep.
In the morning, we ate a chapati (nan-type bread) with potato and spice inside for breakfast, played some more cards, and listened again to some guitar playing. Then the Scottish guy, all tense, showed up and said, “So…?” I could read him and said, “Yeah, we’re coming.” And he says, “In 5 minutes or so??” “Yes,” thinking that he really should have spent his vacation time in Japan rather than India. We gathered our things, and off we drove. Everyone was tired, very few people had slept well in the altitude. By mid-day we all just wanted to arrive in Leh already. But the Jeep was having problems. (Not with the brakes, or I would have found a truck to finish off the trip on.) It was leaking and burning oil, and having similar problems from the day before, and the altitude, being higher the 2nd day than the 1st, wasn’t helping at all. We approached the huge pass at the pace of a snail, as the pass was 16,800 feet high!! We all cheered when we got to the top without a problem. From there to Leh it was all downhill, (no pun intended) and the Jeep was fine. However, the road was at its worst, with huge rocks and potholes, the driver going too fast for the people in the back, as they bounced up and hit their heads on the ceiling more times than they could count, moaning the whole way in pain.
As we neared Leh, in northern Ladakh, I was laughing so hard, because we were on a two-lane paved road, and our driver took this as a sign to drive like a complete lunatic around curves and through the last part of the mountains. One of the Israeli guys said, “he’s involved in some sort of race that nobody knows about.” I said that I was going to enter him in next year’s Indy 500. Another guy said that he was racing the river next to us. I was laughing just because we had crossed these treacherous roads and over these monstrous mountains, the Jeep getting stuck and breaking down, etc….and wouldn’t it just be too ironic to die on this last stretch of road, right before our destination? Well, probably not. Nothing here makes good sense. After all, this IS India. 