Nubra Valley - A desert at 3500 metres!!

Continuing the motorbiking trip, we started out for Nubra Valley on the 4th day in Leh. Nubra Valley is about 120km from Leh, and the variety in the landscape for that short a distance is astounding. You start with the barren mountaints surrounding Leh, climbing up to the world's highest motorable road - the Khardung La pass - which is 40 km from Leh. The ascent is steep - within those forty odd kilometres the road climbs more than 2000 m (Leh is at 3500m, Khardung La is at 5660m!). The road is in a surprisingly good condition for the first 30 of these kilometres, and extremely bad for the remaining 10!! Some pictures from the ascent to Khardung La ..

To give you an idea of the road conditions near Khardung La, sometimes there were streams flowing across the road that had knee deep water. You need some skill in motorbiking to negotiate those without getting your feet wet! The trick is to accelerate just before the water-body, and then once you enter the stream, slacken the acceleration and let the momentum carry you through. I got my shoes wet a couple of times before disovering the trick (and that, believe me, was NOT very pleasant!!):)



The air at Khardung La is extremely thin, and 5 minutes of walking at that height had me gasping for breath. There were tons of tourists who had driven from Leh, and majority of them were Indian tourists who usually never get to see the snow. There's nothing much to do at Khardung La though - the place just has a small army camp, and a budhhist temple (other than all the snow, which people were busy digging into for the snow fights :). Met a bunch of people from NZ and Spain who had come there haveing hauled their bikes on the taxi, and they were planning to bike down the distance to Leh. Good idea - I would never do that distance biking uphill! Some pictures ..







Pictures from Nubra Valley follow - observe the change in the landscape after the descent from Khardung La. The colors change from white, to barren brown of the mountains, to green of the villages, to the brown of the sand-dunes in Nubra Valley. YES, there are sand-dunes at the height of 3500 m. Heck, they even have camels!! You don't believe me? That's why I clicked pictures for you :)

Above is a small village - it's interesting how the locals judiciously use water for irrigation to produce Barley (which is the principal crop of the area). The region gets 4 inches of rainfall a year - to keep things in perspective, the year Bombay had floods it got 37 inches of rain in one day. So 4 inches of rain means there's always an acute shortage of water. The locals use the water that melts from the snow (that's the streams we encountered on the roads) and very amiably divide that between their fields. The result is the occasional extremely green patch of land that you see, and it signifies habitation - otherwise the whole area is absolutely barren.




Camels in Nubra Valley!! And no, they haven't been brought from Rajasthan! These are the local camels, and notice the amount of fur they have on them to protect them from the harsh winters (as well as the harsh sun in summers!). They are special double-humped camels (the ones in Rajasthan are single-humped) that are found in only 2-3 other places in the world (or that's what the locals told me).





Those are 2 trucks in the middle of a road in the middle of a huge huge desert. Amazing, isn't it?