Pangong Lake

Ladakh is amazing! Some people refer to it as little Tibet because they say it has much more in common with Tibet than India and I finally learned why. Yesterday I went to visit Pangong Lake is the northeast of Ladakh and near the border with China. It was a four hour Jeep ride over “the world’s third highest motorable pass” and wow it was breathtaking. Literally. The scenery was positively gorgeous and it went from being warm and summery in Leh to cold and snowy up in the mountains.

I went with a nice British guy, Julian, I met at the hotel because Alice desperately wanted to go to a festival at a nearby monastery and I didn’t feel like navigating huge crowds. It turned out Julian’s father was Italian and owned a restaurant in London for the past 20 years so we spent a good part of the long drive discussing Italian food. Strange topic for the Himalayas, but it made the time pass quickly.

Back to the scenery though… as we drove higher and higher into the mountains and I kept squealing with delight that we were going to see snow it became more and more difficult to catch a good breath. Leh town is at 11,000 feet and this road we were on had its highest point at 17,350 feet so it was quite a bit higher. When I got out of the car at the resting place at the road’s highest point I nearly fell over my feet from dizziness after a few quick steps. I learned quickly to go much much slower as I trudged through the snow to use the loo.

We finally starting going down the mountains and out of the snow, but everywhere I looked it was beautiful. The trip took nearly an extra half hour because I kept asking the driver to stop so I could get pictures out the window. He took the curves gently and slowly, thank goodness, because I was terrified we were going to end up sliding off the road and down the mountains.

When we finally rounded the corner and saw Pangong Lake my mouth was hanging open. It was beautiful. We stopped at the bottom for lunch and walk around part of the lake and it was a really nice afternoon. I had to walk so slowly because I had trouble getting a good breath, the lake was at 14,000 feet, but it was great. In the distance, 40 km, I could see the Chinese peaks and this point on the lake is the closest to China that any foreigner was allowed to go.

It was finally time to turn around and head home and that became another adventure itself. At the rest point at the highest part of the road the car stopped and we heard the words ‘block’ and ‘shit.’ We learned that there had been some sort of rock slide on the road and the pieces were too big to get off the road with hands and shovels. Apparently the army had been called in to dynamite the rock into smaller pieces so it could be removed from the road. After the first blast they let us go down onto the roads thinking everything was clear. Unfortunately, by the time we got close to the impasse, we learned the pieces were still too big to move. A line of cars had to reverse up the mountain road a bit to allow for more blasting. Two hours and four terrifying booms later, they had finally gotten the rocks into movable pieces and we were on our way.

I was feeling a bit nauseous by this time because the air was thin and it was cold enough that I couldn’t stay outside the car for too long. Not to mention the road was narrow enough that there wasn’t all that much space for standing. We finally made it back down to Leh and a group of us had a wonderful dinner of ‘special tea’ (alcohol was not allowed in the restaurant so they served beer in teapots), my favorite Kashmiri apple juice, and Tibetan dumplings called momos. A fantastic day!
I have to confess that the picture here of Pangong is not one that I took because there’s no flash drive at this computer. But I was able to download an image of the lake to the desktop at the internet café and upload for you here. It really was this beautiful.