Manali to Leh

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Trip Start May 31, 2008 Previous
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Entry

  Leh, India
Wednesday, July 2, 2008

I am in Leh. I am very, very pleased to be in Leh, capital of Ladakh. Getting here was most definitely the most challenging, exhilarating, sometimes frightening and always beautiful journeys of my life so far.
Lonely planet describes the journey as grueling. This is a bit of an understatement. It is hardcore. Allow me to explain...
The night before departure was spent packing my bag for only the third time this trip but there was a degree of ritual involved as I genuinely thought I could be packing it for the LAST time I was so nervous about the journey. Plenty of travelers I met who had made the trip always had a little glint in their eye about the very real possibility of death on the highest roads in the world across the Himalayas. It's the sort of forbidden fruit vibe that makes you want to achieve the journey but also makes you feel like in the back of your mind you know what you are doing is almost insane

Arrival in Ladakh

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I managed to find peace with myself in the knowledge that doing the journey was what life was all about and if my time was to come to an end over the next two days at least I would have been doing something most people don't get chance to do.
Arriving on time at the meet up point in Old Manali I happened to be the first one there. 'Have they left without me?' I wondered initially before I met Paris and Lilly, two gap year students from Bristol who were in the Jeep with us as part of the eight who had pitched in to hire the vehicle. The cost of the two day drive was 1500 rupees, just under 20 quid each (very reasonable on reflection).
Dr Dan from Leeds soon appeared with Hayden and Lei (from Canada and South Korea) and Tom and Eddie, a couple from Birmingham. We introduced ourselves and were sat around waiting for a good half hour before our Toyota Landcruiser arrived driven by Sunni who was to take us the 500 (?) KMs across the mountains to our destination.
After loading up the roof rack with our bags we took our initial seats in the vehicle and were all somewhat surprised to find that despite there being belts there were no buckles for any of us to click into! This included our driver Sunni. It was suggested that should we fall off the side of the mountain that seat belts would not help anyway and, in the spirit of adventure, this important fact was swept under the carpet

Yak

. We had no choice really.
Leaving Manali along the river we soon found ourselves competing with a lot of the local traffic on the road up to the nearby, infamous, Rohtang Pass. We were in good spirits, the weather was fantastic after half a day of monsoon and cloud the day before and it wasn't long before the scenery became breathtaking. Not quite as literally breathtaking as what was to come, but seeing mountain glacier melt turning to waterfall up close and virtually in your face was a great way to start the morning.
The days flow soon came to a halt however when the Rhotang gridlock kicked in. As a result of damage to the road from a landslide a week earlier the traffic could only go one at a time over a certain point and this caused a bit of chaos. According to Sunni this was not unusual or unexpected so our party made the best of it, brainstorming what shared resources we could use to make the trip more tolerable. We concluded that my 40Gb Creative and Paris's Ipod speaker docking station would be better than the tape that Sunni had been playing for us (Hindi Cheesy Dance music and Bollywood musical tapes) and set about passing the player round for people to compose a playlist. This definitely made the morning fly by and before we knew it we had passed our first tea stop (Paris was ill and threw up - a shape of things to come unfortunately for her) and were soon at the stunning Rhotang Pass

Rohtang Pass

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India has made a tourist destination of this infamous mountain spot and as a result many places prior to arrival hire out ski jump suits and ski's for people to use on two small runs on either side of the mountain that the road goes through. Locals sheppard goats around the area and Yak herders offer tourists rides on these impressive and somewhat fantastical creatures. I decided they definitely remind me of the creatures the storm troopers ride on Tatooine in Star Wars... J
After a bunch of photos we pressed on and the road became quieter. I think we began to realize the scale of the ride and developed our system for enduring the undertaking. This came about as a result of the Landcruiser being particularly uncomfortable in the back three seats of the vehicle. The suspension being focused on the four tires and the weight of the engine keeping the front of the vehicle grounded mean that the back end was like a bump amplifier! Everything experienced in the rest of the vehicle was 10 times worse in the back and after a while this became VERY wearing. Things were so extreme that one would often bang ones head on the roof and because of the bumps any fluid in the bladder wanted to come out very much sooner than normal. Therefore, at every toilet stop we agreed to change things up with the seating arrangements. Each spot had its pro's and cons; the bumpy back with its legroom, the middle with its stability but less room and the front with its views but zero leg room

Glacier

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After a few more stops a pattern of check points and passports began to develop. It was at one of these check points that I sat with Sunni and spoke with him about his job. It transpired that he had been doing this marathon drive (sometimes in two day stints, sometimes in one mammoth 20 hour session!) for eight years. This was reassuring, however I asked how old he was and he said 24. The bloke had been doing this since the age of 16! He confessed this in the presence of a local policeman who kindly bought me lemon tea and was a good friend of Sunnis, casually laughing off the misdemeanor. Underage working is obviously turned a blind eye on in India.
At the same stop a windswept looking French couple eagerly came to see us who told some of the party they had been staying a three day trek away from this isolated border town in the mountains with a local village and had 'popped over' to get some supplies. This made our little adventure seem a bit pants.
The day had been quite stop-starty and after another stop for the toilet Sunni informed us that we had to start being a bit more hardcore otherwise we would not get to our destination before nightfall and that this would be dangerous on the mountain. The 2 - 3 hr delay before Rohtang had set us back and we now needed to go quickly to avoid the dark. Suddenly everyone became a bit twitchier, the mountains became more desolate and beautiful with the fading light and the roads seemed that bit more perilous. The last two hours began to drag and as we counted down the kilometers to our destination each one ticked off seemed like a blessing.
The mood at the camp site on arrival turned a bit sour when we were told that rather than costing 500 rupees (as we had been told) it would cost 1500 and there were no other accommodation options

Little lake (where did the Pedlo come from!!!???)

. After some hard facts to the local about how much money we had we were shown to our 450 rupee shared tents and soon served Dhal, Potatoe and Rice with tea. Result. Everyone was knackered and we soon headed to bed. However, for me sleep was difficult as I had developed an altitude sickness headache and was not very comfortable in the tent. I didn't get to sleep properly until about 3am and we were up at 05:40 to have breakfast and start our journey again.
Day two was a bit of a blur. Our speakers ran out of batteries and the lack of music combined with little sleep for all of us and a steady climb up to higher mountain passes meant that the effects of the altitude got worse and the quality of the roads seemed to also. The scenery however was spectacular. A reality check came for us all as we hit a checkpoint prior to a desert plateau and Sunni and Paris were told that there had been an accident on the road ahead the night before. One of Sunni's friends had been driving a jeep of people from Leh back to Manali and had been involved in a serious accident. No further details were forthcoming but Sunni told us that in 40 kilometers we would see what had happened.
The following road was rough. Difficult mountain passes turned into open high altitude desert and soon the road gave way to a 'diversion' which meant driving through sandy desert instead of actual road. Sunni had to navigate a course through some really dodgy parts usually in the wake of large industrial sized trucks mainly carrying Highly Flammable Fuel to Leh

Sunni, Eddie and Tom - break before camp

. I was fortunately in the front with the unfortunately unwell Paris who was holding back the vomit most of the time. At one stage she had to have us stop to puke again and some of the inhabitants of the desert, workers on the seemingly constant maintenance of the road rushed across from their site to see us. We had seen people flagging us down from a distance earlier but no one was quite sure why? It became apparent these poor people were begging for spare water from us! Out in the back of beyond, these government workers were clearly under resourced. And it wasn't men who came to beg, whole families worked in the desert, no doubt for next to nothing, and it was a mother with her little girl who came to see our bewildered party and ask for water and sweets for her kids.
Unfortunately the difficulty with such a long journey at altitude is the need to drink twice as much water as usual to combat sickness. The opportunities to get more water even for us were limited and we couldn't spare any. We felt awful, even more awful than the ride was making us feel. Worse was soon to come as we stumbled upon the accident.
We could only assume that the Landcrusier had run into the back of the JCB parked up in the night off the road, on the desert scrub, with no lights on it. It seemed there must have been limited visibility for the jeep, probably due to sand been blown about. They can't have seen the JCB until it was too late

Manali to Leh

. The whole of the drivers wing was smashed, right on the corner up to the intersection of the drivers door with the windscreen. The driver could not have stood a chance but was said to have been in a serious condition with all the passengers seriously injured. Sunni had dived out of our Jeep straight away and was investigating the scene with the police as ironically the JCB which had caused the crash was being used to lift the vehicle up for inspection. Sunni got into the vehicle itself and looked around, nobody seemed to mind.
Sat next to him in the front afterwards I asked if he was ok and he said he was, that he couldn't really understand the crash and that he would visit his friend in hospital after dropping us off. I felt for the guy having to start driving after that. Hayden found out later that someone had been killed in the crash, presumably the driver.
Everything after this point was 'grit your teeth and hope for the best', just 'ride it out' type vibe. Everyone was struggling. The road ahead was epic and frighteningly perilous. We were competing for road space with petrol tankers most of the time, undertaking them in the dust around hairpin mountain roads. A lot of the time the road turned to chewy mud and Sunni said he was getting tired of being in first and second gear all the time. He looked tired. Then the serious altitude sickness kicked in for me and a few others

Group shot at a pass peak

. We approached the last mountain pass, the highest at over 6000 meters and it felt like I had drunk a load of beer, wine and whisky the night before. After crossing the pass and a seat change I was dismayed to realize we could not descend due to more roadworks. I felt really ill just wanted to get down but we were going nowhere. The feeling was quite claustrophobic but nothing could be done but to sit and bear it.
Soon we were winding our way down and every meter we descended felt like relief on the head. Within half an hour or so Sunni told us we were turning our last decent and that we were on the straight road down to Leh. Although we were all in bits it felt like we had made it and as we followed the mountain river along towards Ladakh the scenery soon changed, a Tibetan feel came about and yellow flowers populated the road side.
At our final road side café there was a massive feeling of relief and anticipation for our Guesthouse and a bed in Leh. We had just completed the most difficult journey most of us had ever undertaken. There were comments like 'never again' and 'how much is the flight out'.
Arriving at around 6pm we were dismayed to learn that Sunni was due to set off back to Manali at 2am that morning. The vehicle had developed a nasty sound on the back corner too. Poor Sunni. A most excellent driver though. For us, for the time being at least, the journey was over and we could finally relax.

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The view

Highest pass peak (feeling very poorly now)

Top of the world

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