All Over.....Sigh

I'm sitting in Nihonmatsu, Japan, back at work after the end of another bike expedition. My computer's hard drive has crashed, so I have to type this in the teacher's room while pretending to be preparing lessons.

The ride out of Leh to Srinagar was much easier than the ride from Manali to Leh (2 passes instead of 5, and 7 days instead of 10), but it was still more challenging than I had anticipated. We rolled out of Leh on August 17th, late after a delayed breakfast and last-minute errands. On the way out, we met three other groups of cyclists; Ladakh has more cycle tourists during the summer than any other place I've been, outside of Europe. It takes away a bit from the feeling of going someplace far away and different and exotic if so many other cyclists are there. It's a bit like quantum mechanics: the act of observation alters the observed event. Having all these outside observers makes Ladakh less Ladakhi.

Anyway, it was a grim struggle all day against ferocious headwinds as we rode westward to Alchi. The road stayed away from the Indus, rolling instead through barren deserts and over two tiny passes. Luckily it was cloudy, so we didn't have to worry about water as we cycled over the bone-dry landscape. It was apricot season, and we spent much of the ride munching on apricots and spitting the pits at each other. Lunch was a highlight, as we found the only really good restaurant between Leh and Alchi. Alchi was fascinating: the monastery with the oldest surviving murals in Ladakh, it attracts lots of tour buses to see the 11th-century Kashmiri style of painting. Since the Islamicization of Kashmir centuries ago, this vibrant style of art is only found in three isolated monasteries: Alchi, Tabo (in Spiti) and Tsaparang (in Western Tibet). We didn't have much time to look at the paintings as we arrived at closing time, but we had a quarter of an hour to poke around, inspecting the frescoes by the light of our headlamps. It gave it a certain Indiana Jones feel. Audie, Saakje and I (Reini stayed at the hotel, being allergic to culture) all liked the style, full of life and impish humour and individuality, a strong contrast to the formal, lifeless painting in vogue in Tibetan temples these days. Eventually we were kicked out by the chief monk, who wandered around behind us muttering, in place of "Om Mani Padme Hum", "Is closed, is closed, go home, go home, finished" in his best Buddhist chanting drone. We retreated to a peculiar guesthouse across the Indus whose owner wasn't there, ate more apricots and sat up late in the garden playing guitar.

The next day was much more enjoyable in terms of cycling. We stayed close to the Indus all day, undulating constantly from the riverside to precarious ledges blasted from the rock high above the water. We finished the day lower than we started (not surprising, as we were headed downstream) but there was a lot of vertical metres of climbing and descending inbetween. That morning, Audie and Saakje decided to imitate Reini, who always keeps a small wad of "schnuss" chewing tobacco against his upper gums as a stimulant. Audie and Saakje put the tobacco on their gums and were immediately light-headed. Reini and I cycled off towards Khaltsi, and when we stopped for the best lunch of the trip in a lovely garden restaurant, my sisters were nowhere to be seen. Half an hour later, they staggered in, pale and sweating. In a display of bravado, they had kept the tobacco in place for 20 minutes before Audie vomited and Saakje sat beside her with the dry heaves. Barely able to stay conscious, Audie lay on the road wishing for immediate death, while Saakje developed an ulcerated sore on her gums. Needless to say, the two of them have sworn off schnuss for life, and wonder how on earth anyone could get addicted to nicotine.

After that, the afternoon's ride, turning off the main highway and continuing down the Indus towards Dha, was easy. The heavy military traffic of the morning was gone and the scenery was spectacular: steep-sided rock gorges with little green oases clinging precariously to them wherever irrigation made life possible. We took a break to swim in a crystal-clear mountain stream, a welcome break from the unexpected heat. We ended up close to the Pakistani border, and the scenery looked very similar to what I remember of the neighbouring Pakistani region of Baltistan. After Khaltsi, we entered a predominantly Muslim area, and it was immediately obvious from the vast numbers of children running around. We escaped from the curious mob of the oases and camped down by the Indus in an idyllic desert setting, perfect for another open-air concert.

We had anticipated the third day of cycling as being quite tough; both cyclists whom we had met who had ridden the little side road we wanted to take had warned us of terrible road conditions and a long, hard day. We set off very late from our campsite and didn't turn off the Indus up a small tributary until noon. The first few kilometres of the dirt road were in fact in bad shape, and we climbed steeply and slowly up into a lovely deserted valley of apricot orchards and a rushing river, perfect for another swimming and lunch break. After that, the road improved, the valley flattened and broadened and filled with people (it was easily the most densely populated valley we saw in all of Ladakh). Only 30 km from the Indus, after some fairly reasonable riding, we popped out onto the main highway again and camped in the orchard of a hospitable, friendly farmer who sold us eggs laid 5 minutes before. For supper, we burned a pot of lentils to a crisp.

This fact became important for Reini that night, as he was suddenly violently ill. He gamely cycled on, as we climbed a tiny pass (3750 m, but only 200 metres and 7 km climb from our campsite; after the Chang La and the Khardung La, it was a mere molehill) and then rolled downhill all day to Kargil. The scenery was beautiful: lush, welcoming oases, a last outpost of Buddhism (complete with a Kushan-era 2000-year-old rock-carved Buddha), colourfully dressed women out harvesting and threshing barley. We climbed up onto a lush plateau just before Kargil and looked to the south, where Nun and Kun, the highest Himalayan peaks in Kashmir, loomed over the barren nearby hills. We dropped down into Kargil and promptly got lost, thus subjecting Reini, who was in misery, to an hour of searching for a hotel in the wrong part of town. We eventually settled into the Hotel Caravansarai and sent Reini to bed for 16 hours while we went out to eat and play cards.

Kargil was a noisy, busy, gritty shock reintroduction to subcontinental chaos after the relative peace and quiet of the rest of Ladakh. The main bazaar was full of men in turbans and Gilgit caps, with the few women mostly wrapped in full burqas. The traffic was heavy and cacophonous, and the atmosphere rather unwelcoming. At night the mosque loudspeakers broadcast not only the call to prayer but also the entire 2-hour evening prayer service, at maximum volume. It was a pity that the next morning Reini woke up still sick, and we had to spend another day in lovely Kargil, playing cards and eating well.

We were relieved to leave the next morning, but the relief was short-lived. The road to Dras ran within 6 kilometres of the Pakistani border, and signs reminded us to "Beware! You are under enemy observation" whenever we came into sight of Pakistani troops on distant hillsides. The road ran past endless trenches, dugouts and artillery emplacements, showing that observation was the least of the dangers to beware of. It was a tense feeling, although the Kargil sector has been relatively quiet lately. Every time we stopped, we realized that Indian soldiers were observing us unobtrusively. The military presence completely overwhelmed the local population; tiny villages were flanked by enormous army camps. The Dras river, along which we were cycling, was crossed by numerous bridges leading to the front lines. It was not a relaxing atmosphere in which to cycle, and Dras, when we reached it, was not a relaxing place to sleep. It was full of army trucks and bus passengers and, with no power at night, faintly sinister. Most of the windows in town were made of plexiglass so that they wouldn't be broken by Pakistani shelling. We slept in a tiny "tourist cottage" room and were woken up, over the course of the night, by Audie going out to the bathroom, Saakje headed the same way, Reini following suit, our neighbours getting up for a 4 am bus, a major dogfight, the chowkidar waking us up for our bus by pounding on the window and finally by the morning call to prayer. It was not a good night's sleep.

The next day we crossed the Himalaya range for the second time on the trip. Our previous crossing, over the Baralacha La, had taken us to nearly 5000 metres in altitude, but this pass, the Zoji La, is the single lowest pass over the Himalayas at 3520 metres. From Dras, the climb was very gentle, and I spent the entire morning taking pictures of Gujar nomads driving their beautiful horses and their huge flocks of sheep along the valley. The pass itself was an anticlimax, a very flat valley in which suddenly the water was draining in the opposite direction. On the Kashmir side, however, it was a steep cliff crisscrossed by dusty dirt roads clogged with trucks. It took forever to get past the truck convoys, and by the time we arrived in Sonamarg we were completely gray with dust. All the way down there were army snipers posted every few hundred metres; it added to the atmosphere of fear and war that pervaded the air now that we were in the Vale of Kashmir. Saakje and Audie had flat tires and told Reini and me to press on ahead. When they arrived in the village of Sonamarg, they told us that the snipers kept stopping them to chat and to stroke their arms and try to hold their hands. Saakje's previous high estimation of the discipline of the Indian army changed very quickly that day. The army in Kashmir has a terrible reputation for raping, killing and intimidating the local population, and Kashmir has the feel of a town under occupation, rather like Baghdad or Hebron must feel like.

Sonamarg was a dumpy little town, but the setting was marvellous. Towering glaciated peaks soared over spruce forests, steep valley slopes and meadows cut by clear mountain streams. We could see why Kashmir was for generations the preferred summer retreat for Moghul emperors, British officials and backpackers alike, before the bloodshed of the 1990s killed the tourist industry.

The last day's ride into Srinagar was a wonderful ending to the bike trip. The scenery was pretty, with villages of wooden houses and mosques shaped like Hindu temples, fields of corn and rice and the Himalayas in the distance. After a lunch of samosas, the terrain flattened out and we were in the flat basin of the Vale of Kashmir, a densely populated farming area around Srinagar that contains the bulk of Kashmir's population. It reminded me strongly of the Kathmandu Valley: similar climate, similar altitude, similar sense of a long historic and cultural tradition. The last 20 km were very flat and I suddenly, for the first time all trip (after having been the back marker of the group for over a month), felt the urge to ride fast, prompted by the smooth, new asphalt, and I raced into Srinagar at 30 km/h. Suddenly, without warning, we were on the shores of Dal Lake. After an ice cream stop, we made our way to Nageen Lake and a bevy of houseboat owners. We picked the first one we saw and settled into three nights and two days of colonial luxury and indolence.

We had an entire 30-metre long boat to ourselves: two palatial bedrooms, a living room, a dining room and a pavilion at the stern to sit and look out over the lake. It was the perfect way to finish the trip, and we could easily have stayed another week, eating well, reading, playing guitar and cards and chess and (once, anyway) swimming in the green, algae-choked lake. The bird life was wonderful: kingfishers, eagles, dabchicks and moorhens were in abundance, and we had the feeling of having returned to life after the desert desolation of Ladakh.

And then suddenly it was time to leave; a bike ride to the airport, ridiculous security measures, a last game of hearts and of Scattergories, and then Audie and Saakje were saying goodbye to me in Delhi airport.