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?

In and around Leh

It's been a week in the US now, and what I thought I would post in the first 2-3 days is still overdue. A new job, a new set of people to work with, new place to live, new roommates (well still searching for new roommates!!) - all have contributed to the delay. I need to utilize this weekend to clear up the backlog.

So having made the trip from Manali to Leh in the last post, it's time for in and around Leh. The city of Leh is like an oasis in the desert. After being on the road for 18-20 hours on empty and deserted roads, the city welcomes you with a buzzing life of a foreign tourist centre. Mind you, it's not noisy, and the traffic is also not bad either (though people were saying it's worsened over the last few years) ... but after the Manali to Leh roadtrip, which has only one "town" on the way, Leh seems like you're finally returning to civilization.

Day 1

On the first day, all I could do was sleep (on my stomach!!!!), and rest my butt. The guesthouse I was staying with Obi was excellent considering the amount of money we were paying for it - Rs 300 per night for a double room. It's amazing how all the hotels at the hillstations where Indian tourists throng are so expensive (check out Shimla or Manali), but the foreign tourist destinations are cheap (say for example Vashisht near Manali, and Leh!). The guesthouse owner in Leh (Ser-Dung guesthouse) was attributing it to the facilities that the Indian tourists demand - Air-conditioning, TV with all the cable channels, western style toilets etc. Compared to that, most guesthouses in Leh are pretty bare - the rooms are clean and tidy, but bare with respect to facilities. I didn't mind that coz in any case for most part of the day I was out of the room.

Anyways, in the evening on the first day, we (Obi and me) went to the Shanti Stupa, which was a newly built structure a couple of kilometres from the town centre, and it overlooks the city. The views were very nice especially as we went at sunset.

Day 2 and Day 3:

We spent the two days figuring out the logistics for planning out a trip to Nubra valley. We wanted to rent bikes and drive to the valley, which is around 120km from Leh. You need to have permits from the DC (Distric Commissioner) office because that area has restricted entry as it borders with China. Apparently, something that we thought should take us 1 hour, took us almost a day. There was some weird rule on how a foreign tourist cannot get the permit if in a party of less than 4 people. And like everything in India, the travel agencies have a way around it. We found a guy who runs a travel agency, and he had told us he would get us the permits for Rs 200 (they are free if you go directly to the DC office). What he did was - he had three fictitious passports and visas (fictitious as in they were real people, but had travelled to Leh probably 2 years back) - and he clubbed Obi's name with them to make it a party of four. So Obi got his permit with 3 other people who were probably in Europe, Australia or the US!

To add to the problems, we ran out of money. Well not exactly - what happened was that Obi's debit/ATM card didn't work at any of the outlets in Leh coz it wasn't a MasterCard or Visa. Both of us had to buy airtickets to fly out of Leh - so I converted all the cash that I had (around $200) and we pooled in all our money to buy the tickets. After we bought the tickets, we had a total of Rs 400 amongst the two of us!! In the meanwhile we had figured out a way to get Obi's money - he called up his gf, actually his ex-GF, to tranfer some NZ dollars via Western Union. But because the tranfer takes a day, we were left with Rs 400 for the day. By the evening, we were left with Rs 100 (after a few phone calls to NZ for getting the money transferred), and we were yet to have dinner! As luck would have it, we ran into Remi, the French guy - and we had to ask him to sponsor our dinner. He was gracious enough to oblige us after belittling us for a while :)

We did rent out bikes on the afternoon of the third day, and we went to see some monasteries around Leh. Some glimpses ..

Glimpses - Manali to Leh

For all the advice that I got from people about traveling from Manali to Leh, I was still grossly unprepared. No no - I had all the pills for AMS (Acute Mountain Sickness), I had stuff for motion sickness, and I was even prepared for an upset stomach in the case of diarrhoea. But what I really needed, and what nobody told me that I would need so bad, was ... A CUSHION! Yes, that's what I mean - just a pillow or a cushion - or just something that takes all the bumps as a shock absorber. Because after 21 hours of riding a rickety Sumo on one of the world's toughest roads, my condition was worse than that of Sameer (Saif Ali Khan) in Dil Chahta Hai after he hitches a ride from Bombay to Goa on a truck. Hell it was worse than having 3 GPL's one after the other (if you don't know what GPL is, search for GPL and IIT Kanpur lingo on Google!). Anyways, it took me 3 days to recover before I could rent a bike and brace myself to being a road warrior again.

Anyways, coming back to the journey - it was a 21 hour marathon run which started at 2 am and finished at around 11 pm!! The driver took 3 breaks of around 20 mins each - other than that it was non-stop driving, rickety roads, loud music, and continuous charas smoking (not to mention the middle-aged guy behind me who would fall on my shoulders every few minutes coz he would fall asleep!!). So the taxi works this way: you pay according to the seat you want - the middle row seats are the highest - I paid Rs 1600 for mine in the middle row next to the window. Next come the front seats with the driver, and the cheapest are the 4 seats in the back (and you really need to have a stomach of a devil to not feel sick on those 4 seats). I had great company in the middle row - a frenchman and a kiwi. The Kiwi (his name was Obi) would be my travel partner for the next 5 days. The Frenchman, Remi, was a journalist in France, and was in Leh on a 4 month contract with a trekking agency to accompany French tourists on treks in the area - how I envy the guy - getting paid for trekking in some of the best trek routes in the world!!

Well to cut a long story short, I'll just have to present some pictures, because the beauty of the area is indescribable in words!!

This is the first stop that we made after starting from Manali - right after Rohtang Pass.




Some shots that I took from the Sumo ..


Can you believe that!! That's THREE HUNDRED AND SIXTY FIVE KILOMETRES!!!


Some more shots ..



That's Darcha - yes thats all of Darcha, one of the places for which we kept waiting 2 hours, and for which we were seeing milestones for about 70 km.

Just to give you an idea of how wide the road was ..

Some parting shots ..