Tumbleweeds: Trans-Himalayan Trekking

I’m not going to go into too much detail about each day of this trek, partially because I’m still processing it, but also because it’s difficult to relate the reality of such an experience to anyone who wasn’t actually there.

We spent the first few days at Tsomoriri, unable to get started walking because we couldn’t find a horse guy (the one who was supposed to come with us OR any others). But the lake was beautiful, and we spent the time camping and exploring the area. The lama in the region was doing a puja in the hills where many of the nomadic Changpa people were camped, so we also went up to see what that was about.

After some time we managed to find a really lovely ghora wallah named Padma, who had seven horses and two wives. We really struck gold with this guy—he was wonderful, really kind, and had beautiful horses. The poor dude actually ended up having to run off after his horses multiple times during the trek, because they would decide in the middle of the night that the grass they had seen the day before was much more appealing. So Padma would get up before dawn, find the horses gone, and have to go back the entire day’s worth of trekking (in less than half the time it took us to walk it) get the horses, and bring them back before we left in the morning. What an exhausting, difficult life!

The first day we spend hiking along the lake, and I got two feet full of blisters from my hiking shoes. It turned freezing and sleety toward the end of this day, and the mountain wind drove the icy rain nearly horizontal for the last hour of the hike. We set up camp at the end of this massive lake, but one of the tents turned out to have gotten broken or undone (it was never clear exactly what happened) so it took us a few hours to rig a useable camp—but in the end the helper, Andgu (who was only eighteen and whom we all referred to affectionately as Nono, which means “young one” in Ladakhi) managed to get the tent up using twine and string. This was the best we could do for the tent for the entire trek, but the other option was that four people slept in one two person tent, so we managed.

Let me take a minute to say here that in our guide for this trek, Gyaltso, we were blessed with some sort of beneficent spirit. Not only was he a kind, patient, tough guide with a great sense of humour and huge wealth of knowledge about the plants and wildlife of the area, but he was also a master cook! Every meal was a feast on this adventure, completely in contrast with the roughness of everything else about the journey. Porridge and omelettes and chapattis or fluffy pancakes for breakfast, packed lunches, and dinners with three types of veggies, curries, rice, and for the first few days, fresh fruit for dessert. Not to mention how much tea we drank!

The second day was a river crossing— with the freezing river up just above our knees and rushing current, we used a rope and rolled up our trousers and fought our way across barefoot.

The rest of the days sort of blur together until the pass—weaving through the immense mountains, across dry river beds and piles of red and purple stones, freezing nights and hot sun, thin air that made the going slow on my part. We are all sunburned and windburned and tanned probably beyond recognition. Most of the days, for the 6 to 10 hours of walking, I was alone in my head and the landscape because my pace was much slower than everyone else’s. This was one of the most intense parts about the whole adventure.

On the fifth day we crossed the pass, which I was very bad at. Parang La pass is 5600 meters, and I completely panicked at the lack of air. The first part of the crossing is climbing up a glacier, which started out pretty slippery but thanks to a lot of fresh snowfall the night before, got easier to manage the further up we went. Then there is a valley of snow where the glacier slopes steadily upwards, before tilting sharply up towards the top of the pass. This was the really gruelling part of the crossing, as the fresh snowfall now made it difficult to walk, with each step sinking down above the ankle into blinding powder. This is when I really started to lose it, as my panic at not being able to breath began to make me dizzy, and I fought with the urge to vomit, a headache, and blurry vision for the last hour of the climb. Gyaltso stuck with me and talked me through each step, and I crested the pass about ten to twenty minutes behind the others.

We topped the pass at about 10 am, and then continued to hike until 5 pm to find a camping spot where the horses could find food. Down the mountain, through valleys, and straight up a plateau. Basically, we did the next day’s hike as well. The benefit to this (besides not having poor hungry horses!) turned out to be that we got to the village of Kiber a day early, and were able to spend an extra day there.

The village is beautiful, and because of the extra day there it turned out that we were present for the ceremonial horse racing before the harvest. The oracle of the area gets possessed by the local dev (in this case, two different spirits actually came into him) and he dances crazily and ecstatically, pouring arak and chang all over the ground before the horses take off. We stayed on the hill above the fields until the sunset, watching the horses race and perform various feats down in the valley and along a ridge between two mountains. Then we found some arak of our own and had a little final party with Gyaltso and Nono in our camp.

Yesterday we took a jeep to Manali, which is a ten to twelve hour drive (but only 180 kilometers, if that gives an indication of how non-existent the roads are) and had blissful showers and collapsed into beds at a guesthouse run by a friend of Shivani and Munir’s.

My first thought as we came down out of Spithi valley into lower Himachal was that I couldn’t believe how happy I was to see trees. Forests of pine trees, moisture in the air, beautiful wooden houses—the type of mountains and mountain towns I was familiar with! And the trees! Our guesthouse/cottage is surrounded by apple orchards, so this morning for breakfast I went and picked myself some tangy, crunchy apples. Resting here for a few days.

Here are a few photos of the pass to tide everyone over until I can upload all of the trek pics: