At no time are we ever in such complete possession of a journey, down to its last nook and cranny, as when we are busy with preparations for it.
- Yukio Mishima.
With confidence drawn from Mishima’s famous words, we started planning THE trip. Sitting on a small stone sipping a small cup of tea in a small tea shop in the small city of Mysore (may it forever remain as peaceful as it is now), it is hard to imagine biking across the lofty Himalayan peaks of Ladakh. It is one thing to repeatedly talk about THE trip, to become misty-eyed about feeling the crunch of the tire on snow-white snow, and an altogether different thing to actually go out and plan it, so that those very imaginations become a reality.
Our planning began with research – countless hours spent drooling over biking forums reading about Ladakh, looking at pictures, learning from the experience of people who had already been there. Day on day, month on month, a plan began to take shape. First, a date was decided. You can’t be planning a biking trip to Ladakh when the mountain passes are closed due to bad weather. We decided that the last week of July was our best option, in terms of availability of leaves from office and the weather situation north of Manali. We settled on Saturday, July 23rd 2011 to start our journey.
Once the ‘When’ was decided, we needed to work out the ‘How’. Obviously, we wanted to ride to Ladakh on iron steeds, but how do we get them there, was the question? We couldn’t ride all the way from Mysore to Delhi to Manali to Leh! We thought of renting bikes in Delhi or Manali, but the cost to rent a bike per day is steep. Transporting bikes to Delhi via the very train we were traveling seemed like a good option, and we went ahead with that.
Pre-trip shopping was also taking place simultaneously. Thribhuvan and I went over to a military store in Bangalore (Please contact me for the name of the store, so that it doesn’t look like I am advertising) and bought ourselves a Military Shemagh, a military-camo Balaclava mask and some elastic cords to tie our luggage with. In retrospect, the balaclava, the cords and the plastic garbage bags were the most useful pre-trip purchases. The large, black plastic bags are especially useful when it rains – we used them to cover our bags when it rained, and even when it didn’t, as the highway can be dusty. The plastic bags also helped protect our luggage from the mud bath (also read as quick sand) that is Rohtang Pass.
As always, the ‘Who’ was decided only in the final few days. All in all, Thribhuvan, Mohammed, Sumanth and I were the lucky four who had been seemingly ordained to take up the expedition to the edge of human imagination. Ladakh is most definitely the final frontier when it comes to biking. The four hundred and eighty kilometer odd journey through wild roads, lofty mountain passes, the oxygen-deprived atmosphere, the early sunrise and the late sunsets, through Morey plains, through the cold, frostbite-causing winds and the direct sun-stroke causing sun and across the highest motor-able road in the world in Khardung-La, is not a laughing matter. Especially when the only way to get in touch with all that adrenalin is by crossing four hours of horrible road on Rohtang Pass. You’ll see.
Then we decided on the places we’d see once we were in Leh. We had to see Pangong Tso, on virtue of it being one of the most beautiful lakes you’d ever see. The water changes to a different shade of blue almost every hour of the day. We also wanted to bike through to Tso Moriri and Tso Kar, which were part of forest reservation in Ladakh district, but we eventually didn’t make it. We also couldn’t visit Hundar and ride on the double-humped camels in the cold desert beyond Khardung La.
So once the planning was done, there were a hundred minute changes that took place. But let me not talk about the imperfections on this post. Not yet. For now, let us assume that all the planning is done, to the last ‘nook and cranny’ as Mishima puts it. For now, the trip is being played out in the mind, with mental images being formed based on what the eye has riveted upon on Google’s Image search. For now, everything can go wrong, because for now the plan is perfect and there is only one way to go from there. For now there is a thrill and an excitement and a pulsing beat somewhere deep, deep within, a beat that is not from the heart, but from the soul. And in those moments before our journey actually began, we were in complete possession of it.
Read the second part of this series - Himalayan Dreams - Delhi.
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Some facts:
Trip Route:
Bangalore - Delhi (RN)- Panipat - Kurukshetra - Chandigarh (N)- Rupnagar - Mandi - Sundarnagar - Bhakra - Kullu - Manali (N/RN)- Rohtang Pass - Khoksar (RN)- Keylong - Tandi - Jispa (N)- Sarchu - Gata Loops - Naki La - Lachulung La - Morey Plains - Pang (N/RN)- Tanglang La - Rhumtsey - Karu - Shey - Leh (N,N,N) - Chang La - Pangong Tso - Leh - Magnetic Hill - Leh - Khardung La - Leh - Bangalore.
N – We stayed overnight at this place.
RN – We stayed overnight at this place on the return trip.
Dates: July 23rd - August 6th, 2011. We landed in Bangalore on Friendship Day, which was a wonderful coincidence, as all our friends had come down to meet us, after which we promptly started (unknowingly) the most awesome friendship day party ever. It was only after the party ended that we realized it was friendship day!
Total distance traveled: ~7800 KM.
Total distance traveled on Bikes: ~ 3200 KM.
No. of Bikes: 3 (Hero Honda Karizma, Bajaj Pulsar, Yamaha FZ)
RyDers: Thribhuvan (3), Mohammed (Moham), Sumanth and I.
Cameras: 2 (Both very nice Nikons)
No. of Photos and videos: Ummm… 18.8 Gigabytes worth!
Highest point reached: Khardung La – 18380 ft above sea level.
Lowest point reached: Mentally, the lowest point reached was the few minutes after Rohtang Pass, watching Sumanth go back to Keylong alone, and when we returned to Delhi.
Best place to drink tea: At Khardung-La and at a small tea shop at a lovely place with a lovely name - ‘Gulaba’ - Tea at 10,000 feet.
Longest Distance traveled without refueling: Tandi to Leh (365 KM).
Repairs: Karizma’s back tire was punctured immediately after the craziness at Rohtang Pass. And Yamaha FZ just gave up trying to climb Baralacha-La, at which point we had to load it up in a truck along with Sumanth and send it back 86 KMs to Keylong to get it repaired. But that’s another post.
The accompanying picture will give you an idea on how exactly we planned the trip:
