Ladakh Trip: Day Fifteen. Stok La.

Wake in the night, the moon so bright

Beating the alarm again, I walk into the dim dawnlight

Rumbak isn't completely flat... have to be careful how you orient yourself when sleeping. Don't want blood pooling in your head...
It's bitterly cold. My whole body's frozen solid. Fifteen minutes of shivering, stumbling movement, staggering in circles to warm up before heading out to find an N-spot. Faint footsteps as somebody else on the same quest strolls around in the dark. Everything numb. Knees weak and stiff, legs trembling.

Today will be the toughest yet - we're going to do two days' walk in one, reaching the next point to give us more time inside the park.
Today, we're going to scale the pass - Stok-La.

Dawn breaks, the peaks erupt with brilliance. A gold-red glow flows down the slopes, slowly trickling downwards as the sun rises. We pack up quickly, a small light breakfast, and by seve, we've started walking.



The next four hours are a haze. Initially it's fine, a gentle slope, and us full of energy. And it keeps going - on and on and on. The slope gets steeper. Breath runs shorter and shorter, until I'm gasping. Head pounds. Lungs burn. Legs are literally screaming for the oxygen that just isn't there.
I'm taking five steps, resting. Five steps, rest. Five steps, rest.
I and St struggle up, encouraging each other periodically, in second place; Nm has gone charging ahead, determined to prove he's not a typical lazy Indian bugger to the group of Germans who crossed us early on, completely kitted out and lugging giant backpacks, several of them well beyond fifty. Everyone else trails far, far behind.

The landscape is saw-toothed and jagged, harsh and savagely beautiful. Blue sky, distant clouds. The horizon is clustered with needle teeth. A sudden break when a young woman in neon-green lycra shorts from a different group just in front of us decides that she has to take a dump; and since there's no place but the path, she does it on the path. I have to stand staring tactfully back at the rest of our team until St gives the all-clear and we proceed.

Himachal and Ladakh is filled with these messages, written by the displaced populace now living in political asylum here.

Rock lichens, blazing orange unexpected life on the sterile stone... the slopes are getting steeper. My head has started to pound, now. Resting is a rare luxury - it's only the trail, and just the trail, that's my universe. All else is steeply-slanted scree, only too eager to send you skating down the slopes with twisted ankles and skin scraped raw, on a single misstep. Nowhere to sit. You just keep walking, cursing-singing in your head...

One bloody foot
after the next bloody foot
One bloody mile
after the next bloody mile...

- The French Foreign Legion's unofficial marching song

The local fauna watches us in amused bemusement, munching peacefully on the scrub as we struggle past.

And the slope gets even steeper. S-bend after S-bend. Scrabbling on sliding pebbles and dust. Pause and turn around - Rv has commandeered a horse to carry her, and is plodding gently along. The Professor is showing a sudden dramatic increase in fitness and energy and is catching up with her. Ns is just about a hundred feet away. Look the other way, ahead, up, up, and Nm is at the top, sitting on a rock and peering down.

Whoops. Looking up was a bad idea. Wait for the flashing lights and the ringing in my ears to fade and start again. Now doing little baby steps. Each leg weighs more than a mid-sized car. The mules also cross us, and it's a terrifying sight; each mule has to be physically pushed up by a guide, to stop it from slipping down.

Ns passes us a few minutes later, looking a bit wild-eyed but otherwise doing ok. The scree gives way to a sixty-degree rock spine, made apparently of petrified razor blades.
Walking not possible anymore, we start rock-climbing. It's a relief in a way - my arms can do some of the work now, and my climb up is virtually a series of boosted push-ups, hauling my body along while the feet just about keep up.

The rock is shattered, splintered, and really, really pointy; I stop feeling the edges after a while, and pain fades away. The biggest mistake you can make is get over-excited and try to finish it quickly; it's higher and tougher than you think, and extra effort only makes you dizzy and queasy. Climb - rest - climb - rest - slowly - steadily - wait for the dizziness to fade - climb again - until suddenly, a panoarama opens up of a beautiful valley before you, framed by fluttering prayer flags.

I've done it. I'm at the top.

.

Sit among the razor rocks, staring at the distance-hazed snowcaps, feeling my heartbeat slow down to near normal.

Nm and Ns are standing at the top, looking each other up & down. Before I continue, let me update you - the last few days, Nm has been drinking out of a hydration pack he picked up recently. The hydrapak is a flexible watertight container, with a long rubber tube and a bite-valve at the end; you keep it in your backpack, loop the tube out, and bite down on the rubber valve at the end to open it and allow the water to flow, every time you want a drink. It saves you from stopping and taking out a water bottle.

Ns pulls an Appy Fizz out of his pack, takes a sip, makes a disgusted face, and offer it to Nm.

Ns: Nm, apple piyega?

Nm: Tu kuch bhi pila yaar... mein piyega

Ns: Mutthi piyega?

Nm: Nikaal.

Yg: Yaad rakh - pichhle 10 din Nm ko peene se pehle zor so kaatne ki aadat ho gayi hai...

Ns: .....!!!

We hang up our own prayer flag line, and start heading down again on the other side. It's a vast panorama of green hills, and to reach them, there is a long, winding, trail through a mountainside of scree, sand and pebbles.
Our guide does an Indiana Jones on us, lacing up his boots and launching himself onto the slopes, and sliding down at 500 kmph, somehow managing to stay upright in a cloud of dust. An animated meteorite going for a crash-landing.

A series of disasters now proceeds to unfold. I twist an ankle. Ns tries to imitate the guide and twists his ankle as well. St manages to get stung by something, and gets the sting stuck inside her skin; she sits and starts frantically chewing gum like a turbopowered chewing machine to make a sting remover. Rv, amazingly, unceremoniously dumps the horse, launches onto the slope, and reaches the bottom in 30 seconds, safe and sound, as scree patters to a stop around her and the dust settles. For the rest of us, it takes two hours. The Prof turns a pretty boiled-lobster-pink in the sun, and I give him some sunscreen. He responds by comparing me to a Community Living Textbook. Yg gets attacked by vicious caterpillars. And finally, by the time we reach a small claring at the bottom of the slope, ns has come down with AMS. He pushed himself too hard while climbing and spent too much time at the top.

'Ladakh really is the land of extremes,' said Ns, emerging from behind some rocks fifteen minutes later, 'I was puking and shitting at the same time. What is this, yaar?'

PP agrees with him by sharing his extreme experience as well on the climb up, where he went from acutely constipated in the morning to acute loose motions 3 hours later.

Walked a while longer, into the sanctuary, passing herds of wild Bharal perched on the sheer rock faces around us (who gave Nm a brilliant Nat-Geo-worthy photo-op) until, by dusk, with perfect timing, we reached our camp at Changma.

Prabalgadh Camp

Dawn.

Misty sunlight filtering through the trees on the highway, tankers and trucks lumbering past growling and bellowing with gouts of black smoke. After a while, even that fades away as the roads get rougher... and emptier. After a while, Prabalgadh starts becoming visible in the early morning haze.

Stopping to let the rest of the group catch up, we find a dead snake - a krait - on the road. It's been killed by a vehicle / stick, and is lying with one half-inch fang, razor sharp and needle-pointed, straight up in the air. Step on that, and...

dead, but still deadly.

Prabalgadh is a double-step trek; one to reach the first plateau, with the village of Thakurwadi on top; the second, a steep, gruelling climb in the sun to reach the fort. But that's just incidental; this trip is about camping under the stars. R has come fully prepared with a tent and a blanket; I stick to just the sleeping bag, gratis from ICICI because I was such a profligate user of their credit card.

Vardoli to Thakurwadi takes around a couple of hours, mostly through moderate terrain until the plateau; then, it's fairly dense forest. We pass through a clearing where the locals are brewing some moonshine; the fumes of the gur-based alcohol fill the jungle, and by the time you walk through the clearing, you've breathed in enough to fail a breathalyzer. It's more than just an olfactory assault; looking at it gets you drunk. A giant drum, nearly six feet high and four across, bubbling over a woodfire, filled to the brim with think, brown syrup, while the real stuff drips out of small outlets in the side and trickles down pipes into giant white jerrycans... it's a visual happy hour. You're flying just looking at it.

Another thing you find in the jungle is wildlife. No, not the regular kind like you thought, but the more interesting, unexpected kind. Like sitting down to take a breather, tilting your head back for a drink and seeing a Giant Indian Woodspider suspended in a perfect six-foot web overhead. The scuttling rustles in the undergrowth that's land crabs the size of your fist, pale yellows, ochers, browns, blacks, and the occasional ferocious orange, waving claws threateningly if they realize you can see them. Beetles that look like they have emeralds embedded in their bodies. Ferns growing out of solid rock.

Thakurwadi takes you back in time a dozen, fifty, a hundred years. From outside, nothing changes... there's still the village well, women washing up with ash, the tethered goats and roaming chickens, guard dogs... inside, there's satellite TV, a DVD player.

After lunch, we head off to the plateau where we're going to camp; it's an open field of grass, with the Prabalgadh peak on one side towering up into the sky, and the whole of Panvel district on the other, 3,000 feet below, turning hazy with distance and height. It's so quiet... the crunch of grass under your footsteps, a single distant bird, the sighing wind... which form a perfect counterpoint to crackling plastic sheets being spread, trekkers snoring in the shade of the trees in an impromptu but very welcome siesta.

After which, it's time to setup the camp. The site is brilliant; open fields with grass for a comfortable rest, good view, flowing water, the works. We spread the sheets, unpack and set up the tents. R finds out that the extraordinarily heavy tent-bag she lugged all the way up to the top actually contains, not a tent, but an inflatable bed. There is much cursing of misguided non-trekking parents that can't differentiate between a tent and a bed, but it still makes history - the first time on a Nature Knight trek has someone actually carried their bed up with them.

After a brief game of highly customized cricket, we relax and watch the sun dip into the mountains. Every sunset is always spectacular up here, and every sunset is unique in it's own clouds, colors, reflections... the only thing any sunset from the top of the Sahyadris has in common with it's kin is that no photograph ever does justice to the real thing. There's an insider photographer's joke -

"What does it take to get a great shot?"

"f/8 and be there."

You have to be.

Dinner is back at the village, where by candlelight, we sit down and stuff ourselves with the local village food... bhakri, rice, a mountain of papads, and a veg that blasts the roof of your mouth into orbit. And in between the tears and the gasps and the desperate struggle for one of the five glasses of water between 21 people, you would have D putting in his 2 cents' worth - that what we feel now in our mouths is nothing compared to how the other end of the alimentary canal is going to feel tomorrow morning.

Thanks, Mr. Sunshine!

But the actual sunshine's all gone, and night comes fast. A line of torches marks our way back to the camp, through dense undergrowth, muttered curses as we stumble over rock and into cowshit, the freaked-out hysterical dog having a nervous breakdown in the distance, and on a couple of heart-stopping instances, a sudden twitch and rustle in the bush that says, less than three feet away from you is a large animal and it's watching you.

The moon takes a long time rising, and when it does, it's breathtaking. Three hundred and sixty degrees of silvery desolation, broken by the giant, dark, and faintly foreboding bulk of the Prabalgadh fort outcrop, and one lonely campfire pushing back the darkness that fills the universe by a few feet, in which we sit, chatting and laughing. NK has come up with a new add-on to the trek experience; team games. Your chance to wreak unholy vengeance upon all those who trotted lightly up ahead of you like mountain goats while you gasped under the sun, the slope and the sack of stones on your back. We spend several hours trying to make the opposing team run itself ragged, fall off the cliff, or commit suicide in frustration when struggling against a very unique set of rules we produce; and vice versa, so in the end, everyone's happy.

Maybe not everyone, though...

Unbeknownst to us, K had decided to call it a night early and had comfortably snuggled into their tent, and just while they were drifting off to sleep...

(snuffle)

K: (leaps upright, wide awake)

...

Silence

...

(lies back down)

(snuffle, crunch, much closer)

K: (petrified whisper) J! J! Wake up!

J: (snore)

K: shutupshutupshutupshutupshutup

J: (louder snore)

K: wake up stop snoring goddamn you there's a leopard outside the tent!

J: (grunt) Hm? Wha?

K: LEOPAR- there's a leopard outside! Don't make noise!

J: (blink)

...

K: Go see!

J: Are - are you sure?

(crunch. crunch. crunch. snuffle. crunch)

...

(side of the tent suddenly bulges inwards with the zrrrrrrr noise of something sliding over nylon)

K&J: AAAAAAAARGHH !!

'Leopard': MOOOOO!

After that experience, everyone was laughing too hard to go back to sleep while J & K hyperventilated for a while.

Morning is sleepy, and people finally come to life when D and I arrive from the village with a giant vat of woodfired Maggi.

Afternoon goes in trekking up to the top of Prabalgadh, where we wander past more wildlife like a giant termite nest, a fire ant nest hanging in a tree like a frankensteinian fruit, and monkey calls. Didn't see any monkeys, though, in spite of having D, J, S, and J climb up into the trees and make monkey behavior to attract them. They just hid and hooted at us. Possibly in disdain.

Reached back in a state of utter heat-exhaustion, and dozed off in whatever shade we could find.

Woke up with the horrible realization that there's still 4 hours of walking to do back to the vehicles... still, had to be done so was done, chai in the evening, and long drive back. Blah, blah, etc.

I remember the silence. The sound of the wind in the grass. The sunset turning every tiny trickle of water into blazing gold. The incredible moonrise. Setting up the tents. Sleeping on plastic sheets, staring up at the sky.

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