Now I Leh me down to sleep

Greetings from Leh, the little town at the tiptop end of India, capital of Ladakh and desert oasis par excellence. It's our second day of laziness, lassitude and banana lassis, but our bike ride here was unexpectedly tough in terms of effort and acclimatization to high altitude, and Audie, Saakje and I all seem to be even more tired and out of shape than we were when we arrived two days ago. It's all very puzzling.

But I digress. Let me backtrack. I spent three days of touristing in Delhi: Humayun's Tomb, the oldest mosque in India (the Qutb Minar and attached mosque, much of it built from a Hindu temple, which leaves the curious sight of half-clothed Hindu deities on the walls and columns of a mosque, which shouldn't have any depictions of the human body at all), the green and lovely Lodi Gardens full of royal tombs, the vast and stately Government buildings along the Rajpath which are reminiscent of the layout of Washington DC.

After that, it was time for the ultimate horror: the night bus north to Kullu. It was cheap (only 220 rupees, or 5 US dollars) but interminable, uncomfortable and rather like an experiment in sleep deprivation. I was glad to stagger off the bus in Kullu with my bikeat 10 am, assemble it, and bike off to the nearest hotel to sleep away the rest of the day.

I spent the next day on a day trip up one of the more famous Himalayan valleys, the Parvati. It was very pretty and forested and steep, but the incessant rain impaired my appreciation for its beauty. At the end of the paved road, I found a gloomy little hot spring town that looked a bit dismal, and promptly turned around and spun back downhill again towards Kullu.

I rolled along the east bank of the Beas River the next day, along one of the five major rivers of the Punjab. In 326 BC, some distance downstream, Alexander the Great's plan to conquer the world came to an end on the banks of the Beas when his troops mutinied and refused to march any further east. Nowadays the Kullu Valley, through which the Beas flows, promotes itself as the Valley of the Gods, and if it is, then the gods have a good aesthetic sense of where to live. It's a fairly steep-sided valley, with pastures and peaks sloping down to huge waterfalls leading into conifer forests and then vast fruit orchards.

I put up for the night in Naggar, site of a lovely castle situated like an eagle's nest high above the Beas. I was a paying guest in the castle, which at 200 rupees ($4.50) was a steal. I went out to explore the Roerich Gallery, full of the paintings of the anthropologist/artist/mystic Nicholas Roerich, who spent many years in Naggar.

The next day I finished my solo cycling with a ride up into Tel-Aviv-in-the-Himalayas, also known as Vashisht, a little village near Manali with some nice hot springs and full of Israeli hippies. I indulged in the hot springs and watched the Israelis making the scene. After a day and a half, Audie and Saakje arrived in a driving rainstorm and the expedition was complete. A day of fiddling with bicycles and buying supplies and we were ready to roll north to Ladakh.

The first day was spent climbing steadily up the 4000-metre Rohtang Pass, over the Pir Panjal Mountains. The scenery was lovely and green and full of waterfalls and forests, and since the road was partially closed ahead, there was little truck traffic to disturb us. We had a perfect lunch of chapattis and Gruyere cheese overlooking the valley, and then climbed on, past long queues of trucks and jeeps delayed by landslides, to a riverside campsite at about 3000 metres' altitude.

The next day we climbed on, up the endless switchbacks, through cold fog, reaching the crest of the pass in the early afternoon. Another chapatti and Gruyere lunch finished off the cheese, and we bumped downhill on execrable roads into the valley of Lahaul, where we camped beside the Chandra River.

Day 3 began with the arrival of a new member of our crew. Reini, an ex-professional snowboarder and serious mountain biker from Austria, caught up with us as we were about to set off. Despite the obvious mismatch in our cycling speeds, he asked to join us for the company. That day we rode through the settled parts of Lahaul, a very Tibetan-looking and Tibetan-influenced valley, lunched in Keylong, the capital, and then slept beside the river after a long day of good riding.

Day 4 was shorter and harder, with a long climb uphill towards our next pass. We passed beyond the region of cultivation and for the first time started to feel the effects of not being acclimatized to altitude. We camped in a dismal location next to a road construction camp and slept poorly.

We were awoken the next morning by a herd of sheep running amidst our tents. We continued our slow climb up to the Baralacha La (4900 metres), the slowness being emphasized by the fact that the morning's sheep and accompanying shepherds beat us over the pass. Our progress was further slowed by the appalling road conditions, construction and traffic jams, and we ended up pushing our bikes for long stretches. At least we got over the pass and descended to a beautiful riverside meadow to camp.

Day 6 featured some of the best actual cycling of the trip, on roads with real asphalt and no landslides, and we raced through lovely landscape until we suddenly found ourselves confronted by a 700-metre climb up an interminable set of switchbacks. It was while climbing those that I realized that I was not at all acclimatized, and I felt absolutely exhausted. Audie and Saakje weren't feeling at their best either, but at least they got uphill at a respectable rate. We camped on the other side of the 4900-metre Nakee Pass, looking up at the next half of this double pass, the Lachung La.

In the morning, after running into an English cyclist, Pete Jones, who was heading the opposite way, we climbed slowly up the 5000-metre Lachung La and then descended along a lovely desert canyon, on unlovely formerly-paved roads, to the army base of Pang, where we called an early halt. Audie, Saakje and Reini stashed a cache of water ahead of us that afternoon while I dozed in the sunshine, hoping to recover some vestiges of energy and strength.

Scenically, day 8 was a major highlight. We climbed up onto the high-altitude (4700 metre) Morey Plains and then undulated our way across this lovely grassland, watching for wildlife (didn't see any) and nomadic Changpa shepherds driving their flocks across the plains. At the end of the train, we climbed halfway up the final and highest pass, the 5300-metre Taglang La, but my body badly let me down, with my lungs, heart and legs all completely exhausted. We camped beside the road in an old road construction site and settled in for another night of limited sleep and less rest at 5000 metres.

We finally made it over the Taglang La the next morning, with all three Hazenbergs climbing very slowly, out of breath and out of energy. We realized we weren't even close to being acclimatized to this altitude, a feeling emphasized by how disconnected our brains felt from our bodies, a bit like being enormously drunk. This altitude-induced inebriation made the ride downhill more than a bit challenging and dangerous, but we finally hit great pavement, settled Ladakhi villages and food, and absolutely flew downhill. We passed through our first Ladakhi villages, full of Buddhist chortens and gompas and white-washed cubic Tibetan houses, and then through a landscape of eroded vertical rock strata that Audie compared to a stegosaurus graveyard. Before we knew it, we were in the Indus Valley, eating momos and camping in an idyllic riverside spot.

After all the effort involved in the first 9 days, the last day was a bit of a triumphal procession, along level, good roads, with stops to investigate Tikse and Shey monasteries, and even the stiff climb away from the Indus into Leh seemed like a cakewalk. It was a shock to be in Leh: stuffed to bursting with tourists (lots of familiar faces from Vashisht), restaurants everywhere, traffic, noise and (best of all) pizza and beer.

We've realized that now, even after 2 days of sloth in Leh, we're not even acclimatized to the moderate 3600-metre altitude here. I don't know what went wrong with our acclimatization, but we're in worse shape now than when we started in Manali. Maybe our upcoming 5-day ride to Panggong Lake will see us come back to life. Or maybe not. I think it's time for another pizza.

Hope everyone's having a great summer, and hope to have better luck with Internet connectivity in the future.

Jule!!

Graydon