Every morning that we wake up to has taken thirteen billion years to create. And Sarchu is truly a wonderful place to witness a freshly made morning. A tent-town set in a bowl of a valley, its beauty should be appreciated in the warmth and light of the Sun. This we did, as soon as we woke up. Standing outside the tent, I stared at the huge wall of rock that blocked the horizon and extended, unending, to my left and right. I turned around to see a mirror-image of the huge wall of rock running east to west. It reminded me of the gates of Mordor.
As the sun rose above the mountains, I walked towards one of the mountain walls, enjoying the heat of the sun on my face and looked back to see the wind moving all the tents in the same direction. The mix of warm sunlight and cool breeze lifted my spirits and I walked back smiling. Near the tents, I saw 3 and Moham already gearing up, chatting with another biker group we had met last night.
Conversations start easily here – ‘Are you coming from Rohtang or heading towards it?’ and ‘We are coming from Leh; heading to Manali. We started in Srinagar and came through Kargil and Drass’ and ‘is this your first time here?’ and ‘Did you visit Tso-Moriri?’ – Easy conversations. No strangers on the road.
Everywhere, people were starting to get up and mull around, calling for tea and breakfast. We picked up pace too, knowing that the target for the day was Leh and Leh was a relatively massive two hundred fifty kilometers away. There is no cellular network in Sarchu, or throughout most of the Manali-Leh route for that matter, so we couldn’t get in touch with Sumanth. We ate a quick breakfast and hit the road, wondering where Sumanth had woken up that morning.
Sarchu is the last town, right at the edge of the imaginary line where Himachal Pradesh turns into Jammu & Kashmir, and the Lahaul valley ends. As we crossed the check-post to exit Sarchu, the policeman there smiled and stopped us. I had forgotten my helmet in his tent when I was signing our entry records last night, and he had come out to give it to me. We chatted for some time in Hindi with the man, who told us he had been posted there since November of last year, and it gets dreary some time. He told us he is from Rajasthan, so this cold feels unnatural to him. And he told us our friendship reminded him of his, which made him remind himself to return the helmet, which made us smile. We thanked the man and started.
We enter Jammu & Kashmir through its district of Ladakh, and already signs of change become apparent. This border between Himachal Pradesh and Jammu & Kashmir is caused more by the change in geography than by any change in culture or religion or language. The elevation has changed the texture of the mountains and the land. Everything is the same dust-brown monochrome, except near the rivers, where there is a sudden burst of crystal blue and green, along with the twinkling colors of wild flowers. But mostly the road is skyward and the river is left behind, so your mind settles down to ponder the contrast of just two colors – sky-blue and dust-brown.
The elevation has also changed the wind, which is rougher now, and carries the dust with it. We are instantly thankful for our balaclavas. The roads themselves are filled with the same dust-brown dust, lifting and dancing in puffs as a bike cuts through, and sometimes rising and rising to form swirling dust devils. The lack of color and texture make common cause with the harsh winds to spread a blanket of melancholy. There are no unnecessary sounds here. The wind pipes down sometimes when there are gaps in its conversation with the mountains. And by now, the sound of the engine has become second nature - the mind doesn’t listen to it anymore. In this increasing lack of sensory stimuli, I hold on to the silence and listen to it. I notice this first at the Gata Loops.
The Gata loops are a series of mountain switchbacks, twenty-one in total, which quickly take travelers up to more than fifteen thousand feet. The roads here turn a light shade of grey because of the sand. This sand is also an indication of what is to come at Morey Plains, but we don’t know that yet. As we cross switchback after switchback, the panorama opens up in a stunning display of dull, bronze mountains with tufts of grass growing here and there, and views of elephant-skinned roads spread beneath us. The roads curve with the curving mountain, exploring it like the hands of a lover. We spot many off-road trails that cut a shorter path across the switchbacks, but they could only be navigated when returning in the opposite direction – our bikes do not have enough pull to challenge gravity at these heights. We did explore these off-road options when we returned to Gata on our way back.
Right at the top of the loops is a scenic view point and a well-placed gazebo. From there, all I see is the blue sky being devoured by the craggy teeth of mountain peaks, and a yawning valley between me and the mountains I seek. All I hear is a deep silence, created by the lack of disturbance, created by the awesome presence of the mountains, and accentuated periodically by the rush of sighing wind. The silence here is somehow enlarged; somehow manages to hold the mountains in thrall; holds me in thrall. This silence echoes, repeatedly, between the enormous halls formed by the titanic walls of these mountains. I can come up with no other explanation to the depth of this silence except that it must have been churned and magnified ten thousand times, ceaselessly, by these valleys in repetitive echoes of stillness.
We have two more mountain passes to conquer, and we go out to meet them. The first of these two is Naki-La, which we crossed without realizing, without fanfare. But Lachulung La, boasting an elevation of sixteen thousand four hundred feet, threatened to delay us further. As we neared the top, it became increasingly colder, and we saw patches of ice decorate the walls of Lachulung. We huddled deeper into our jackets. At the end of an immense stretch of road on the long, curving shoulder of the mountain, we spotted workers clearing an enormous landslide. Landslide number two. We are closer now to the Zanskar region and the Ladakh valley. We waited and watched large earth-movers operated by the military and the Border Road Organization (BRO) slowly clear the road. As we waited, more and more bikers joined us, and a few cars. The biker group from Maharashtra, who we thought were ahead of us, also came up behind us. As if we had met long lost friends, we got off the bikes to greet them, and they returned our enthusiasm. Eventually, after forty five minutes, a narrow path was cleared through the rubble for bikers to get through, and we made for this gap.
The top of Lachulung La is cold, lonely, grey, melancholic and windy. These are combinations of sensations I have never experienced simultaneously before. We are at sixteen thousand feet, higher than we have ever been before, our bodies feeling the effect of the lack of oxygen and the difference in pressure. There is a strange kind of lethargy that comes with this setting, a paralysis of action and thought. Fingers refuse to form a fist, legs refuse to move. And so we force ourselves to stop for a quick photo session in the gathering storm of grey. The scenery is the color of slate, and clouds like storm-chopped sea, but we are eager to begin our descent to escape the cold.
Life returns to the landscape. We begin to see tufts of grass and shrubs, and distant terraced farmlands far beneath, near the river. As we descend, warmth returns to our skin and bones, unfreezing us, and changing the mood. The roads are level now, and we can see solitary white-washed Chortens dot the landscape, looking like little soldiers braving the wind. There are shapes in the sand now, sculpted by the wind and water that is born in the winter and melts in the summer. The shapes are formations in the sand that look like pyramids, triangular and conical, with channels of snowmelt separating them. Closing in on Morey plains, we see these formations more and more, near the gorges formed by the river Sumkhel Longpa. In the bright afternoon Sun, these shapes stand upright, looking very much like Chortens themselves, except they are the color of sand.
Our entry into the plains is spectacular and sudden. One moment we think we are about to begin climbing another mountain, the next minute we realize that we haven’t entered a mountain road, but actually a parched steppe elevated to the roof of mountains. The Morey plains consist of a single stretch of road that extends out towards Tanglang-La for forty odd kilometers. The road is straight; part concrete
, part just sand the consistency of talcum powder, and a good place to bury your bike in if you don’t need it anymore. That one road is broken in many places and is being rebuilt in places, so sometimes you make your own road, drawing fishtails in the sand as the bike struggles to grip. Oh, the sand! You could use it to powder a baby’s bottom. While it is softer than any sand I’ve encountered before, riding on it is difficult, to say the least. The tires fail to grip the surface, and the bike constantly swivels, forming curves on the sand that look like snakeprints. We saw in Morey plains the opposite of Rohtang; there the motorcycles refuse to move because the quicksand mud won’t let go, swallowing the tires whole; here they wouldn’t hold still and maintain balance because the sand is too silky to support their weight. All Chortens and stupas and natural formations disappear once inside this place. These plains are an exploration into the ecosystem of the highest cold desert in the world. We enter a phantom land, a land where no one lives, where nothing stands as an identity of human presence or a sign of human existence. It is as if this world is content to live without our touch. The river comes to meet the road at one or two places right at the beginning of the plains, but for the rest of the journey across, you are alone with the sky and the wind and the breathing, whispering sand.
The sky here is enormous, undisturbed visually by trees or mountains, and you feel as if the window to heaven has been opened a little wider than ever before. The view is a hundred and eighty degree panorama of far, distant mountains, sloping hills covered in sand and rocks and scree, and the sky looks like an inverted bowl of blue porcelain. We try, and fail, to capture the enormousness of the place on our cameras. A camera cannot capture this grandeur, not in its original scale. Words just graze the surface of the true spirit of this place. You need eyes; human eyes attached to human minds to really witness and appreciate Morey plains. You need to be present to be dazed by it. It is a place where everything is larger than you are but you don’t feel dwarfed by anything. On the contrary, you feel as large as that geography because your spirit expands to fill the space in between. Here, the recognition comes that this world is bigger than we imagine it to be. Here, the sky is larger than the earth. Here, you are no longer your body, but you are soul, and simply eyes; wide, expanding eyes, caught seemingly within a drop of water that falls flat on the ground and acquires a delicate, transparent, quivering, semi-spherical shape. From within this semi-spherical world you witness the earth stretch long and narrow and straight as all other directions are conquered by a liquid sky.
How do I describe to you the wonders of this place? Words fail me, and perhaps I fail my words. If you and I were eye to eye you would see in my eyes a fiery spark as I reminisce about the fast moving clouds in an ocean of sky. But writing is a one-dimensional art. If I were to paint a picture of this place and show it to you, in its colors and in its depth you would understand. If I were to sing a song of this place, in its lilting melody you would understand. But in the art of writing one tries to show what one sees, what one feels - with words; words that are interpreted differently by different experiences of those words. Therein lies both the great strength and a rare weakness of this art. There is a chance that something is lost in translation, but there is an equal and comforting chance that something is also gained. Something is always gained.
We cross Morey plains in complete silence, lost in observation, and reception. A traveler must have a greater capacity for silence, to meet silence with silence, to be able to descend into silence. In this state, all he is, or all he should be, is an observer. This is his penance. He must attune to a mental silence, so that his prejudices do not taint his observations. He must attune to a physical silence, so that his words do not stop him from listening. The best of things do not ask us to sacrifice - they give without needing, without asking. If one feels silence is a sacrifice, it is not; for a traveler, it is an investment. This silence will give him more words, more thoughts and more creativity than is possible with speech. On a journey, words are important, but not as much as the lack of words.
On journeys like these you will understand how easy it is to slip into meditation. The repetitive refrains of the engine, the echoing mountains, dust devils rising and falling like great desert djinns, an endless road of sand and the thinking mind all conspire to lead you deeper into the dark of your mind; you will understand how quickly a journey into the wilderness transforms into a journey into the mind. You will understand zazen. You will allow ideas and thoughts to rise like foam from churning sea, and you will allow them to return again into this mysterious sea, because you are not looking to answer questions about the foam, but you are seeking to find out more about the sea, and what holds the sea.
And all of this, this entire process of slipping into an unplanned meditation, becomes second-nature; subconscious. Out there alone in the rarefied altitudes of mind and mountains, you will realize that the yearnings for the exploration of the subconscious comes from within the subconscious. More and more you will seek them out, these terrifying, midnight roads, these unconscious submissions to silence, and realize that silence is the prayer of the spiritual. And you will befriend silence.
We carried the silence of Morey plains in our hearts and on our lips as we breached the mighty Tanglang La. At seventeen thousand five hundred feet above sea level, some say it is the third highest motor-able road in the world, after Khardung La and Chang La. The mountain pass was frosty and bleak. It was three in the afternoon, and the noon sun hidden behind murky clouds cast a somber shadow upon us. We spent only a few minutes there – the cold, sharp breeze and the grey tone of the afternoon provoked a deep sadness that reminded us of Lachulung. The exhaustion caused by oxygen depletion did not help either, and we descended Tang-Lang La with great unease. But Tanglang La had the some of the most enchanting mountain roads we had seen. The mountains are so large that we could see and follow the one single road around the curve of their shoulders, so that a biker at the end of the road on the opposite face of the mountain would appear miniscule in the vast distance to the biker at the beginning of the road, but still visible in the endless length of that road. The echo of the engines crash into each other in the halls of the mountains, and it is a sound that I still dream to; the depth of each valley is marked in the eye of my mind, the height of each mountain; the color, the hue, the way they pierced the sky.
Descending rapidly from the heights of Tanglang Pass, we rushed with momentum of the descent to Rumptse, still about hundred kilometers from Leh. Our spirits rose with the slow increase in greenery. Somewhere along this route, we caught up with a river, and followed its directions into a deep gorge, where the road ran parallel to it, and the walls of the gorge rose high on both sides, casting a glorious gloom. The strip of blue sky trapped between the lips of the gorge itself looked like a river, and the two rivers reflected each other, just as the two walls did. The walls were strangely formed, like slices of cake that had fallen on top of each other. And these walls of sedimentary rock changed in color with distance, slowly transitioning from hues of blue and pink to green and lavender and black and purple. Through this gorge the three motorcycles sped, following the road and the parallel rivers of earth and sky.
We stopped in the middle somewhere, and listened to the sounds. The gurgling of the river is magnified by the walls of crumbling rock, and here and there small caves can be seen into which streams of the river disappear. In the constant half-light, strange shrubs of brownish plants grow through crevices in the rocks. Looking up we could see a few trees peeking into the gorge, as if wondering what happens here down below. I searched for stones of the same color as the walls of the gorge, and found many such examples.
As my faith changes shape and becomes closer to nature, I find I am attracted to some ideas of animism. Walking in the half-dark of the gorge, searching for uniquely colored stones, I realize that I have begun to believe in the power of amulets. I believe in their ability to act as capacitors, as time machines and as teleportation device
s. I collect stones from hills and sand from beaches, driftwood from the seas and strange-looking pieces of wood from forests. I have a large collection of sea shells. I collect trinkets that represent my relationship with people, to recall in repose moments I cherished with them. I charge stones and crystals and earth-bound things with energy, in moments where I find myself with an abundance of energy. So I have a piece of thick, red twine that was part of a birthday present, a hairband from the night she let her hair down, a letter full of love that is not a love letter, and a fingerprint on a napkin. The relationships may have ended, but through these tiny things I can connect instantly to my memory of that person, and when I do, folders open up inside my mind that transport me back to places I have been with or memories I have created with that person. They act as time machines and portkeys, as mnemonics for memories. They have the power to spark old emotions that I assumed were forgotten but still lie hidden beneath layers of denial or routine. I can touch a lavender seashell and return to a beach on the Arabian Sea, and relive moments of that journey. I can touch a revolver-shaped piece of wood and experience again the night and the campfire of Tadiyandamol. Or I can touch these talismans of power and absorb from them pockets of energy that I had stored in them during moments of overwhelming beauty and positivity. You can’t help but believe in the power of amulets when the mind is bent by the will of these little things filled with disconnected pieces of yourself. You come to recognize them as fragments of your mind. Just the simple act of attributing, of attaching a living memory of your mind to a non-living entity gives it a strange, unspoken form of life, and an undeniable strength. I find more and more that this practice of personifying elements of nature with pieces of your soul is an important one. When I bring them back home, I also bring a piece of myself back home. And when I do return with my amulets, not only do I return with stolen pieces of a journey, but I also open up little wormholes to another time, energy and space. When I take something from a scene and make it my own I fuse that moment with me forever. I transfer the contents of precious seconds into these keepsakes, thereby emptying parts of my soul into them. Don’t you see then how perfectly obvious it is for these things to respond to me? They are chinks of my soul. With these stones and shells I share a language and a kinship.
It occurs to me now, here in this half-lit canyon that a stone also is in contact with nature. And by that leap of thought I have to agree that everything inside nature is in contact with nature, is in a dialogue with nature. Everything that exists is within this infinite sphere of nature, and therefore everything is in some way in touch with it. And so my realization at Baralacha pass was only half complete. Non- living entities also change, also lose to and gain from nature, and in so doing attain an unchanging identity. Everything that changes, remains. We just don’t recognize these changes, because they are slower, and occur on massive geographic-scale. And if this is the case, then there is nothing that is ‘extra-nature’. Nothing exists that is supernatural; paranormal. Nothing exists that is not communicating in some way with nature. The thought comes that perhaps we need a new definition of what is alive; that something runs through everything in nature that gives everything an un-defined form of life. This needs discovery.