The Anatomy of Journey

  The Sun at Jispa plays with all the theories of light. Nestled at the foothills of majestic mountains that cover the village from three directions, mornings at Jispa play with the conditions of dawn longer than is fair. But that is its beauty. True morning only comes when the sun finally rises high enough in the sky to overcome the mountains. Until then, however, Jispa holds its breath soaked in the half-light of dawn.

  When I peeped out from the belly of our ‘firefly’ tent that had been home for the night, I saw in that half-light the true size of the camp. The river we had heard last night was a large stream, breaking into laughing tributaries at every silly obstacle. The sun had definitely risen – I could see a dull yellow glow restrained by the mountains, its strength bursting through whatever gaps it could find between them, crepuscular rays escaping through them like golden sand from fingers – but the campsite was still and empty. I walked to the kitchen tent, more to warm myself than for the tea I wanted to ask about, but I found a guy standing in front of a large, kerosene stove, boiling milk. I asked for tea and he nodded and showed all five of his fingers, indicating time, not being able to speak as he had covered his head with a large, brown monkey cap.

  As I walked back I counted the tents around us. Last night in the dark we had counted seven glowing tents. Now I saw eleven of them. The floor of the camp site was gravelly and muddy, like a river bed, and perhaps in times of heavy rain the place floods and they have to move the camp higher. Walking around, I found two more tents – smaller and a contrasting red in color – one each on the opposing ends of the campsite. A man-made channel from the river passed right under these red tents, carrying the river water right beneath them. Curious, I walked to one of these tents and looked inside.

  A commode stared back at me, thankfully empty, without any human perched on top of it staring at me with baleful eyes for interrupting his (or, god forbid, her!) privacy. A forlorn, red bucket stood to the left, trying to look as dignified as it could under the circumstance and in the company it kept.

  From within, one was allowed to ‘lock’ the tent using simple Velcro. The pipe leading out from the commode (too much detail, you say?) entered the earth mysteriously, and I suspected there was no plumbing, but perhaps a compost pit. Curiously I investigated this entire operation, and realized that one was supposed to scoop the water right out of the running stream using the bucket so conveniently placed, and finish the ‘operation’. I smiled at the ingenuity. A stream of a river running right through the tent! If it wasn’t for the other settings inside the tent, I would have said it was beautiful. However, I lost a little of my humor when I touched the water with my feet. It was seven in the morning and the water was obviously freezing. I was freezing! As one can imagine, the experience was a bone chilling one. I walked back to our tent half-amused and half-frozen.

  Rohtang had had a nastier effect on the bikes than it had on us. The mud had gotten into Karizma’s shoe brakes and rendered it useless, had entered the FZ’s clutch plates and destroyed them and surprisingly did nothing in comparison to the Pulsar. So we spent the first two hours of the day with the mechanic at Jispa. You’ll find his shop overlooking a green, rectangular rice field that borders the river – great place to be a mechanic, if you ask me. The small shop is built using a local construction technique of stacking slates of chipped stones horizontally. It is beautiful to look at and quite strong, he tells me.

  Once the bikes were fixed, we quickly covered the seven kms to Darcha and then the thirty-four kms to a place enigmatically named Zing-Zing Bar. We stopped at Zing-Zing Bar for a cup of tea, noticed that it was around 1 PM, and actually felt confident that we would reach Pang by nightfall. What arrogance!

  From Zing-Zing Bar, you’ll notice a gentle climb as you start up the slopes of Baralacha La, the first mountain pass since Rohtang, and the second on the Leh route. Baralacha La is about 4900 meters above sea level, and is gentle when compared to other mountain passes like Tanglang La and the mighty Khardung, but our motorcycles noticeably struggled.

  In my pre-trip research, I had read a great deal about ‘nallahs,’ streams of fast moving snow-melt descending from the mountains that intersected roads and made life difficult for a biker. There are many nallahs that are easy to cross, and we’d already had some experience with them. These were so small and un-dangerous that they warranted no second thought.

  We huffed and puffed to complete a high hairpin turn on what seemed like the last and the highest stretch of Baralacha, when we came face to face with a great river that had been let loose right in the middle of the road. I looked up to see where it was coming from – the barrage of water descended with unabashed velocity; twisting, turning, crashing and pounding the stones below into smooth pebbles as it smashed into the road, flooded and destroyed it completely and descended into the valley beyond. This torrent of water divided the road into two, and we were on one side of it, with motorcycles and bags and open jaws.

  The sound of the water crashing down silenced everything else. The menacing water threw an arching spray that reached twenty feet in the air. We stopped our bikes on the banks of this river, and the irony that the banks of the river happened to be two sides of a highway did not escape me. On the other side, we spotted our friends from the landslide - the group of bikers from Maharashtra – waving at us, laughing at our stunned faces and indicating that we should cross quickly.

  Technically, we couldn’t have chosen a worse time to reach the nallah. At one in the afternoon, the midday sun was doing all it could to melt as much snow as possible turning the usually placid nallah into a torrent. It is always advisable to cross these streams early in the morning or late in the evening for the same reasons – the flow of water is lesser and hence the crossing is easier, and more importantly safer. But when we reached there, the gushing water had gathered enough force to push us and our motorcycles off the road and off the mountain.

  I remember vividly the first time I set foot in that body of water. My toes went numb immediately, and even before my mind could register the shock, my legs started to scream. Goosebumps traveled up my spine and settled in the vicinity of my neck. It was a visceral, physical response. We had to enter the stream without shoes and socks on because they would take a long time to dry. The stream was more than knee-high. After much discussion we decided Moham would ride in with his Pulsar first, while 3 and I assisted on foot in case he got stuck. Another complication we had thankfully foreseen was the presence of large boulders and pebbles and stones, invisible in the rushing froth of the water.

  The road had been washed away in the torrent long ago, and had been replaced with the terrain of the mountain. There was every chance Moham would get stuck halfway in, and then would be in serious danger of getting washed away, along with the bike.

  With the planning complete, we hesitated briefly, the numbness of the arctic water still heavy upon the mind, until Moham decided to plunge in first with the bike. He handed us his shoes and bag, folded his jeans up to his thin, bony knees, and rode in. But halfway into the nallah, just as we had predicted and right where the torrent was strongest, he got stuck. He revved the engine, but we saw that the rear tire had lodged itself between two large, unmoving boulders.

  Moham was in definite danger of losing the bike, if not himself to that force of nature. 3 and I threw ourselves into that cold, Stygian stream, our legs freezing and turning red. Each step we took over the sharp rocks and boulders and the smooth pebbles hurt twice, and our feet felt like chunks of painful ice. We were dazed at the sudden turn of events, dazed that Zing Zing-Bar could have been so placid, that Jispa could have been so tranquil, meditative even, and now suddenly the world had turned upside down in the rage of this frigid river. Adrenalin rushed into our veins and pushed us to do things we could not have otherwise done.

  We splashed to the middle, as fast we could, to the bike and to Moham and steadied them both. In the brief respite our united strength gave us all, I looked up from the middle of the chaos and the
torrent to see its source. Sun and ice winked back. Our legs by then were completely numb and dead. At the count of three, 3 and I lifted the motorcycle from behind with a great heave and released it from the boulders. Immediately it slipped and swept away sideways, fishtailing in the force of the water, but we grabbed the motorcycle from behind and Moham lifted it up again and straightened. The engine was taking in a little water, but still running. We needed to place the rear tire on a smoother surface.

  Moham pushed the bike forward and suddenly a final boulder underneath gave in, the bike gripped and Moham roared forward, having found steady ground. We stayed with the bike and Moham until they reached the safety of the road on the other side.

  Exhausted, we looked back at Sumanth on the other side, clicking away at us and at the ensuing madness. It hit us hard that we had only managed to take one motorcycle across. One bike down, two to go, along with four heavy bags. There was no other way but to go back through the river of ice. Swords and daggers knifed into us as we walked back in, me in the lead and 3 behind me, which was good because halfway into the stream I lost my footing and almost fell, but he steadied me.

  In total, we crossed the nallah six times, each time dying and living with the sensation. Those moments are really alive in my mind because we were completely present in them, feeling every little random drop of cold water that crashed down on us, the scratches on our feet and legs, muscles frozen and responding unusually slow. I think in that one hour that we took to completely cross the nallah, it dawned on us that this was exactly why we had traveled five thousand kilometers from home - to walk on the path of adventure, to really stare at the harder aspects of nature in the face, to live slightly beyond the edge.

  The crossing of that stream was a threshold; a defining moment in our journey that altered our perception of the experiences to come and shaped our memories of the entire trip. It became our climactic entry into the world of Ladakh and it was instrumental in re-igniting our wandering spirits.

  We breathed in relief and recollected ourselves on the other side. The afternoon sun still beat down upon the snow and the river still raged, and we watched, bemused, a couple of young students from Delhi try to cross with their own bikes. The biker group from Maharashtra had helped us before continuing their journey, and we thought it was befitting to help these guys in return. Karma. So we jumped in a seventh time, more because we already missed the adrenalin and the cold of that stream than anything else, and helped them cross.