Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends. You are constantly off balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things – air, sleep, dreams, the sea, the sky – all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it.
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Cesare Pevase
The air in Manali is rare and pure, as if spewed and churned by the mountains of ice and fog that surround the town. Beas hugs the mountain feet fleetingly in her journey towards and beyond the hotel we were staying at. From the second floor window, we could see her dance her way to an unknown destination. She, like us, is only intent on traveling.
We slept late and woke up late. I, for one, experienced a dreamless and easy sleep. A sure sign of the fact that you are actually living your dreams is that when you fall asleep, you fall into a dreamless state of being. For surely, you cannot dream within a dream!
The plan for the day was to ride as hard as we could to reach Pang. The 480 kilometers from Manali to Leh is a tough journey, as the increasing altitude and decreasing oxygen level affects the mind, the body and the bike. On this route, you will find four of the world’s highest motor able mountain passes – Baralacha La (4894 meters above sea level), Naki La (4740), Lachulung La (5065) and Tang Lang La (5360). Tang Lang La can be reached only by crossing the 40 kilometer long Morey Plains, a dustbowl of a valley that is filled with sand the consistency of talcum powder.
But before you reach these, we have to cross the first of the mountain passes – Rohtang Pass. 52 kilometers outside Manali, it’s about 11,000 feet above sea level. With a self-confidence that lead to ignorance, we decided we would be able to cross Rohtang pass in a few minutes and reach Pang by the end of the day’s ride.
The 52 kilometers to Rohtang was scenic, beautiful and interesting. As we climbed the steep roads to Gulaba, we noticed our bikes choking in the oxygen-depleted environment and the sheer cold. A little apprehensive about the bikes and the various climbs ahead, we stopped at Gulaba for a cup of tea. We found a tiny tent that offered tea and omelets, and decided to dig in. A sign board declared that we were at ten thousand feet above sea level. As I write this, I am looking at the notes written in my cell phone from this time. One note says –
Smoke from the tea mixes with the cold breath coming from my mouth and nose. Tea at 10000 feet! Place – Gulaba.
After taking a few pictures, we decided to ride on. When we reached the bottom of the pass, people stopped us and told us not to go on. We picked up words like ‘traffic jam’ and ‘landslide’ and ‘rain’ and ‘mud’, but didn’t give them too much attention. It was only when we reached the first of the bad roads that we realized we were in for the time of our lives! The road on Rohtang pass is not a road. It is a careful mix of mud and sludge and water. This is grinded, churned and pulped by the giant trucks that take up half the road, almost pushing the rest of us off the mountain. And when you feel the mud has reached the consistency of quick sand and find yourself knee deep in it with a bike between your legs, you have also got to contend with the traffic! Hundreds of bikes, cars, trucks and cyclists jostling with each other to cross the eight kilometers of quick-sand roads.
In this melee of adventurers, we found ourselves momentarily speechless. The climb was steep, the road looked more and more like a drying river bed, and the traffic was not moving at all. I think all of us mentally decided that either we count this as fun, as part of the experience we were wanting, or go through the eight kilometers painfully. This is important - that we learnt to ask ourselves what we’d like to take away from an experience. Even in day to day life, this act of self-analysis (of responding to an event instead of reacting to it) saves us a lot of bitterness that really does not exist. And there really is no place for bitterness and disappointment in a journey, especially considering the show the clouds and fogs of Rohtang were putting up for us. Standing at the edge of the road, staring into a deep ravine, watching clouds pass beneath us while tourists walked and cyclists squeezed through whatever gaps in the traffic they could find, are memories we’ll never forget.
And this attitude of optimism is driven home by the local people there - the people who witness these conditions everyday and live amidst them with a smile. One enterprising old man walked to the shoulder of a hairpin turn, cleared a little space for his small table, placed a large, clay pot filled with tea on top of it and started selling. He placed four chairs behind him and we immediately parked the bikes in the middle of the road to drink a cup of tea, relaxing on the chairs as the traffic struggled to move slowly. I guess one has to de-attach oneself from the situation one is in, from time to time, to gain a fresh perspective of his condition. If this is done often enough, he realizes that it’s really not that bad. The good and the bad are gently extricated from each other. Ultimately, one is simply thankful. For the condition, for the experience, for the new perspective.
We were joined by a couple of Bangaloreans and an Italian fellow who called himself Raaz. He had a helmet on with a camera attached to it, to record every moment of his trip. He regaled us with stories from his travels, told us about a Rastafarian he had dated for a while, and went on for some time about the advantages of freezing one’s sperm and storing it for posterity! We noticed that all the bikers became part of an uninitiated family, from Rohtang pass onwards. Strangers, when on bikes, become friends here, we realized. We shared a common zeal, the same yearnings, the same spirit and the same destination. I am sure that we are all not the same in any other respect, in any other moment of our lives, but at that time, sharing the same time-space, we were united. We all recognized this instantly. There is no explanation of why and what creates this bond – we are just in it. And this was reflected in the way everyone biker smiled or waved at another biker as they’d pass each other. In the slippery mud someone would fall along with his bike, and we’d all rush to help him out. And every time an exhausted biker would stop his bike near the small tea shop on the shoulder of Rohtang, we’d all congratulate him for making it this far, encourage him and order a cup of ‘chai’. This is another kind of camaraderie, one without introduction or continuation, but still memorable.
Eventually, it took us four hours to get out of the maze of mud and magic and we got out to come face to face with a wall of ice! In the gray mist, we discerned a huge cascade of water that had frozen in places. It cut through the ice and cut under the road and rolled on towards the ravine. We stopped here for some pictures (see below), filled our bottles with the mountain water, and started riding again.
If the 4 hours on Rohtang hadn’t tired us, the fact that Karizma’s back tire waspunctured in the melee, that 3 had to ride the bike standing, and by putting all his weight on the front tire for 21 kilometers before we could find a mechanic, that the mechanic didn’t know how to fix a flat tire (!!), that 3, Moham and I fixed it and that Pang seemed like a distant dream, really did it for us. I think we had realized by then that Pang was unreachable that night. We had decided Sarchu would be attainable, but after all of that, Sarchu also seemed beyond reach.
We decided to ride as far as we could. Along the way, we reached Tandi. Tandi has the last petrol station along the highway, until you reach Leh. A signboard near the station clearly states this (see below). We crossed Tandi and Keylong, and reached the surprisingly smooth roads of Jispa. To our right and left we saw huge mountains enveloping us, the darkening sky only a sliver between them. The river ran parallel along the road, and in between the road and the river, we saw the Jispa Tent Camp, a scenic, picnic-y spot filled with large tents, glowing in the dark like large fireflies with lights turned on inside them.
We exited the highway into the camp, and asked for a place to stay. We got a tent for the four of us for eight hundred rupees – money well spent. The visual imagery was amazing. The tent opened right onto the river, behind which was a grey, rocky mountain, behind which were further grey, rocky mountains. If you followed the line of the road, you could see the village of Jispa far away. As twilight lost to the night, the stars came out. Until then, I had never seen such luminance in them. In a few days, the stars of Jispa would be beaten by the stars of Morey Plains… but that’s another story.
For now, we ate our dinner in the community tent, sharing our meal with the other travelers there. It was cold, but the mountains protected us from the worst of it. We walked along the river, unable to see it in the darkness, but listening to it. I think this is important - to experience a natural phenomenon with a different sense from time to time; to see the lightning instead of just hearing the thunder, to get wet in the rain instead of just watching it.
